At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to start better documenting my reading habits and sharing them here with all of you.

The point is two fold – by curating and documenting, my reading has become more purposeful and diverse. Also – I believe that curation of good content brings a lot of value, helps people explore and allows the best stuff to raise to the top.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy these as we move in the latter half of 2014.

Here we go…

1. Java and Spring

>> Validation groups in Spring MVC

Validation groups for putting complex constraints around your data – always useful.

>> Generating equals(..), hashCode() and toString()

Simple overview of the way we handle the equals() and hashCode() implementations in our Java code.

>> The dark side of Hibernate AUTO flush

A deeper look at Hibernate flushing mechanism, warts and all. Sometimes Hibernate doesn’t play well with native SQL – and forcing it to do so is not the kind of thing you’d want around your clean codebase.

>> Spring Framework 4.1 RC2 Released

Very quickly after the RC1 a few weeks back, Spring 4.1 RC2 is out this week. The good bits are – better DI with the new @LookupMethod annotation, Hibernate 4 fixes, Protocol Buffers support and a host of other improvements.

>> Jquery Ajax Autosave Example in Spring Mvc

An interesting autosave example using Spring and Jquery – might come in useful.

2. Technical

>> Get Rid of the URL Pollution

A bit about making your URLs friendlier. I’m doing the same whenever I copy-paste an URL – I remove the analytics parameters and any other param that’s not vital to keep.

>> ChessTDD 12: Blind Alleys

Last piece of a very good series on TDD. I’ve been covering the series from day 1 here, and I fully recommend it to anyone that hasn’t yet fully embraced TDD as a daily practice.

The one thing I would have liked to seen happen with the series is it would have been great to see it as a payed product. For one – because I think it provides enough value to justify that, but more importantly, people tend to value something more if it’s not free.

3. Musings

>> Failing at Microservices. (Please avoid our mistakes!)

Fantastically helpful writeup about what it takes to do microservices right as a team – some of these points are all to familiar.

This is a honest look at a past project, the team the good and the bad – which is quite inspiring.

4. Comics

Last week I had some fun and included a comic into my weekly review. So this week I decided to have even more fun and dug through my comic bookmarks for the best stuff – there’s going to be a few in my weekly reviews.

Let’s start with the classics:

>> Real Programmers

>> Duty Calls

>> Devotion to Duty

Course – Black Friday 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

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Partner – Moderne – NPI EA (tag=Refactoring)
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Modern Java teams move fast — but codebases don’t always keep up. Frameworks change, dependencies drift, and tech debt builds until it starts to drag on delivery. OpenRewrite was built to fix that: an open-source refactoring engine that automates repetitive code changes while keeping developer intent intact.

The monthly training series, led by the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne, walks through real-world migrations and modernization patterns. Whether you’re new to recipes or ready to write your own, you’ll learn practical ways to refactor safely and at scale.

If you’ve ever wished refactoring felt as natural — and as fast — as writing code, this is a good place to start.

Course – Black Friday 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:

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