At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to start to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung.
Curating my reading has made it more purposeful and diverse – and I’m hopefully providing value to you as well by allowing the best content of the week to raise to the top.
Here we go…
1. Spring
>> Spring Boot Actuator: custom endpoint with MVC layer on top of it
Spring Boot continues to be super-useful – and the Actuator concept with its minimal effort setup is one of these easy wins that can really add a lot of good stuff to your web app.
I’m finding more and more good uses for Spring Boot – but unfortunately not enough time to blog about it yet.
>> Datasource configuration with Spring Boot
Useful rundown of how to configure various types of datasources with Spring Boot.
>> Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data
A solid end to end piece on building a REST API with an interesting combination of technologies – the usual Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA, but then JAXB.
Also – Liquidbase is worth mentioning just because it provides a much better base to build on than the Hibernate schema tool.
>> Spring Rest API with Swagger – Creating documentation
The “REST purist” side of my brain used to say that a REST API needs no documentation if it gets HATEOAS right. But I long since silenced the purist and embraced the pragmatic side of my brain when it comes to REST.
Swagger is a great option to publish a solid documentation for your API with relatively little effort. I’ve been using it and – besides the fact that it bloats your war with 30 megs worth of libraries – it’s a great tool.
And of course, webinar replays and an upcoming one that I’m excited about:
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>> Webinar Replay: Architecting for Continuous Delivery: Microservices with Pivotal CF and Spring Cloud
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>> Webinar Replay: Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring, Groovy and Crafter
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>> Webinar: Spring Boot and JRebel 6.0
2. Java
>> Adaptive heap sizing
The JVM is an amazing, adaptive piece of engineering.
Tuning it however is a different ball of wax – you need to do a lot of it to start getting good results. The funny thing is that – if you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to see better results just leaving the settings alone. But if you do that, you never learn – just don’t do it on a production system.
>> 350 Developers Voted for Features in Java 9: Do They Agree With Oracle?
Good Java 9 articles are few and far between. This one definitely fits the bill – it presents new data and brings some insights into what developers actually want out of the next Java release.
3. Technical and Musings
A must-read for any developer. Doesn’t matter if you’re an employee, a freelancer or doing consulting work – get over there and read it. There’s not a lot of clear and transparent information out there about this stuff, so enjoy this one.
>> Positive Feedback
Feedback can be a powerful thing – both positive or negative. So reading through the last to pieces on “Dan Dreams of Coding” has been fun for me.
>> ChessTDD 20: Refactoring in Earnest
The next step in the Chess TDD series I’ve been covering here since the very beginning. This is scheduled for weekend viewing for me – but I wanted to include it here anyways to keep your weekend busy as well.
4. Comics
By now, the XKCD is mandatory:
>> A-Minus-Minus
>> Labyrinth Puzzle
>> Retro Virus
5. Pick of the Week
I recently introduced the “Pick of the Week” section here in my “Weekly Review”. The interesting part is that it’s entirely exclusive to my email list subscribers.
So – if you came to this article from my email list, you have the pick already – hope you enjoyed it. If not – feel free to subscribe and you’ll get the next one.
