Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:
Java Web Weekly, Issue 154
Last updated: September 6, 2019
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.
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.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
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:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
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.
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.
Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.
Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.
Regression testing is an important step in the release process, to ensure that new code doesn't break the existing functionality. As the codebase evolves, we want to run these tests frequently to help catch any issues early on.
The best way to ensure these tests run frequently on an automated basis is, of course, to include them in the CI/CD pipeline. This way, the regression tests will execute automatically whenever we commit code to the repository.
In this tutorial, we'll see how to create regression tests using Selenium, and then include them in our pipeline using GitHub Actions:, to be run on the LambdaTest cloud grid:
Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:
1. Spring and Java
>> Feeding Spring Boot metrics to Elasticsearch [frankel.ch]
After low level system data, the next family of metrics you want to start tracking and monitoring are JVM level metrics. Here’s a good way to go it with the ELK stack.
>> Reflection vs Encapsulation – Stand Off in the Java Module System [sitepoint.com]
A quick and practical intro to the various mechanism that are going to power the module system in Java 9.
>> Creating Maps With Named Lambdas [minborgsjavapot.com]
Interesting way to create a Map.
>> Spring Boot and Thymeleaf: Reload templates and static resources without restarting the application [codeleak.pl]
Years back, we always had to restart the server/redeploy the app for minor changes. Of course that’s no longer the case now – which has a significant impact on our speed of rolling work out.
If you’re working with Thymeleaf in a Boot app – here are a couple of ways to do exactly that – changes with no restarts.
>> Hibernate Envers – Getting started [thoughts-on-java.org]
There are a few different ways to slice implementing audit logic with Hibernate – and Envers is definitely an interesting solution to the problem.
>> Making Spring Boot application run serverless with AWS [pragmaticintegrator.wordpress.com]
Very interesting writeup showing how to transition a Boot application to run servlerless on AWS. I definitely need to give that a try to get a better understanding of what it can do.
Also worth reading:
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>> Three new JEPs [royvanrijn.com]
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>> Hibernate Tips: How to select a POJO with a Criteria Query [thoughts-on-java.org]
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>> How to customize an entity association JOIN ON clause with Hibernate @JoinFormula [vladmihalcea.com]
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>> Automating Integration Testing of Spring Boot Applications on Travis CI and Sauce Labs [vorba.ch]
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>> TomEE 7.0.2 Full–Docker Smoke Test [adambien.blog]
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>> IntelliJ IDEA Inspection Settings for Refactoring to Java 8 [jetbrains.com]
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>> Prevent SQL Injection with SQL Builders Like jOOQ [jooq.org]
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>> Book Review: Learn Apache JMeter by Example [infoq.com]
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>> Slicing The Monolith–With Java EE And Docker [adambien.blog]
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>> The state of portable authentication in Java EE, end 2016 update [arjan-tijms.omnifaces.org]
Webinars and presentations:
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>> JDK 8: Lessons Learnt with Lambdas and Streams [infoq.com]
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>> Project Jigsaw in JDK 9: Modularity Comes to Java [infoq.com]
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>> Hacking together a CircularArrayList (Video Tutorials) [javaspecialists.eu]
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>> Netflix’s Edge Gateway Using Zuul [spring.io]
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>> Building Modern Web Applications with Angular2 [spring.io]
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>> Progress in Electronic Governance [talk] [techblog.bozho.net]
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>> Designing, Implementing and Using Reactive APIs [infoq.com]
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>> Webinar Replay: Bootiful CQRS with Axon – Nov 16 [spring.io]
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>> Testing Spring Boot Applications [spring.io]
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>> Going Reactive: Building Better Microservices [spring.io]
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>> Testing with Spring Framework 4.3, JUnit 5, and Beyond [spring.io]
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>> Spring Tips: Bootiful Dashboards [spring.io]
Time to upgrade:
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>> Spring Statemachine 1.2.0.RC1 Released [spring.io]
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>> RxJava 2.0 Released with Support for Reactive Streams Specification [infoq.com]
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>> Spring Integration 5.0 Milestone 1 Available [spring.io]
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>> IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3.1 RC Updates JUnit 5 Support to M3 [jetbrains.com]
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>> Mockito 2.2.29 [github.com]
2. Technical
>> Time in distributed systems [plumbr.eu]
As I started to split my own implementations and very carefully joined the microservices bandwagon (or train) – I very quickly found that I need to relax my definition of time for each service.
That is if I wanted to be able to trace a single request through the system and still make sense of it.
This is a quick writeup all about that.
>> Data Science up and down the Ladder of Abstraction [infoq.com]
A long piece worth reading if you’re passionate about data science, Clojure – or both.
>> Sharing Experiences from a Microservices Journey [infoq.com]
I’ve been doing a lot of CQRS, Event Sourcing and microservices in the past couple of years, so naturally this article was quite an interesting read – well worthy if you’re doing any of these.
>> How Chrome’s buggy content security policy implementation cost me money [troyhunt.com]
Beyond the “money” thing, there’s a lot to glean from this piece about Content Security Policies and the way browsers chose to implement CSPs.
Worth understanding if you’re building stuff for the web.
Also worth reading:
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>> AWS X-Ray – See Inside of Your Distributed Application [aws.amazon.com]
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>> Spock – Formatting complex input parameters in parameterized tests [solidsoft.com]
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>> Kubernetes Monitoring with Heapster, InfluxDB and Grafana [couchbase.com]
3. Musings
>> One year as a Developer Advocate [vladmihalcea.com]
Hibernate should have obviously done this a long time ago 🙂
>> Reactive Streams and the Weird Case of Back Pressure [takipi.com]
If you’re working with and ingesting a large volume of data, back-pressured async stream processing is a godsend.
This is a good intro to how the standard came to be – and a very interesting read.
>> The Journeyman Idealist: Architect of Programmer Paycuts [daedtech.com]
This writeup is definitely good for some perspective on the way we all work and creating value. Some solid podcasts recommended in here as well 🙂
>> Rewrite or Refactor? [daedtech.com]
To be or not to be? That was THE question for a long time, but no longer 🙂
Now, it’s to refactor or rewrite – mainly because that decision has the potential to literally put a business under.
>> Clean Code: what is it? [silkandspinach.net]
I always find that, no matter how much I think I understand a concept, I don’t fully grok it until I have to sit down and actually define it. It always turns out to be more difficult than I expect it to be.
Also worth reading:
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>> Expert Beginner Store Kickstarter (And Giveaway!) [daedtech.com]
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>> Transforming Development with AWS [allthingsdistributed.com]
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>> On asking ‘why?’ in test automation [ontestautomation.com]
4. Comics
And my favorite Dilberts of the week:
