Java
This joins the old discussion (do I need an ORM?) with new and promising tools – have a look at the code samples and be surprised that this is indeed Java code. Very cool.
A solid way of handling exceptions in JUnit tests – the BDD catch-exception library. I’m giving it a try now – as it indeed looks very cool.
Good brush up on tuning Java Garbage Collection for a real-world production environment. Goes over most GC concepts, but does so in a pragmatic, optimization-focused manner, which is a nice change from the standard GC articles out there.
Interesting take on the established Maven Release Plugin, making all the goodies of git flow first class citizen.
IBM Developerworks has two new articles on Java 8 – language changes and concurrency.
And finally, a nice webinar introducing the upcoming Tomcat 8 server. If you're working with Tomcat, this is a good resource to keep up to date with what's coming down the pipe.
Spring
Project Sagan – the new reference Spring app – looks more and more interesting, especially considering that it's powering spring.io. This article illustrate how the code is deployed – very nice series that I'll be following closely.
If you've read any of my last few weekly reviews, you will have seen earlier articles in this series. This kind of application – making sense of log file data – is something that, one way or another, any decent sized project should solve.
Short and to the point illustration of how a CSRF attack works and how to protect against it with Spring Security (3.2+). Very nice.
Technical
I have talked about this series before – but, perhaps not surprisingly – it is again the read (or watch) of the week. Why do I keep picking it? Simple – it's one of the few things that has a good shot of getting you over the initial resistance of doing TDD. That took a few years for me, so I know it's not easy – but the results are huge.
So – straight to the point – if you're going to only read one article this week, go read this one (actually, reading the first two parts would be better).
Vlad has a useful overview of the new functionality that came out in MongoDB 2.6.
The infamous n+1 problem exists in Web APIs as well. This article has a lot of information to digest – so take your time with it.
Yes, Heartbleed was disclosed this week, and yes, there are a host of articles covering it, but I'm assuming you already read some of them, so I'm including a single one out of many – the github report.
Musings
I think that we all overestimate our ability to context switch – and the sooner we accept that switches are developer kryptonite – the sooner we can do something about it. This article is a great reminder of that fact.
res – REST with Spring (eBook) (everywhere)
