JDK 15 hit General Availability today. While I spend most of my time in Kotlin these days, I do keep a close on Java, as it still has a special place in my heart, so I thought I’d make a quick post highlighting some of its new features. :) There are quite a few changes in the release, so I’ll list all of them, but focus on the ones I think most developers will find more interesting.
I was recently asked to convert a Spring Boot-based "CLI" to a real CLI utility. It was actually just a normal Spring Boot application with REST endpoints that we’d hit with curl. Pretty ugly. After a few frustrating hours, I finally settled on a solution that seems to work pretty well for us. It uses Spring Boot, of course, as that’s our library of choice, plus JCommander for the argument handling. This is a pared-down example of how the application is structured. And because I care about of each you deeply, I’ll present it in Java AND Kotlin. :)
For those of you in a hurry, you can get the complete code in my GitHub repo. Everyone else, feel free to read along.
Recently, I started working on a new project and I wanted to give Jooq a go. I also wanted to integrate Flyway: I wanted jOOQ to generate its various classes based off the database schema, and I want to Flyway to create that schema. That’s all easy enough, but I’m resisting, right now, committing the generated classes to source control (to avoid the churn and additional maintenance), so how do I make that happen with as little work as possible? How do I make it work in a CI environment? Thanks to Maven, the answer is lots and lots of XML. :) Let’s take a look…
Over the years, I’ve found myself processing a set of data and storing it in a Map, say, something like Map<Long, List<String>> (think something like a list of Room objects, keyed by a building id). I have found myself writing it something like this (in non-idiomatic Kotlin):
1
2
3
4
5
6
val foo = map.get(key)
if (foo == null) {
foo = MutableList<String>()
map.put(key, foo)
}
foo.add(bar)
Fortunately, the Kotlin standard library has a better way:
1
2
map.getOrPut(key) { mutableListOf() }
.add(bar)
If key is not found, the lambda is run, adding the result to Map and return to use the value, new or otherwise, to which we add bar. Much more concise. :) Generally speaking, any time you can let the language/compiler do the work for you, you’re going to be better off.
One of the great things about Spring Data Repositories is that they provide a number of query methods out of the box, with the ability to add additional queries simply by adding carefully named methods to the interface, and Spring generates the actual implementation for you. Sometimes, though, you do need to color outside the lines a bit. Thankfully, Spring allows us to do this. You just have to ask it nicely. Here’s now.
Thanks to haste and some sloppy copy-and-paste, today I deleted the wrong remote Git branch. There’s nothing like learning in a panic, but that’s what happened. Here’s what I learned on how to fix that.
The Red Hat twitter account just asked this question: "Communities grow by uplifting others. What is one piece of advice you’d offer to a new developer? Reply below and then check out some advice from #RedHatter @somalley108." Here’s my input.
As a general rule, if you’re writing software, you’re probably pretty intelligent. That intelligence, while important, of course, can also become a hindrance. For example, I’ve been told by coworkers, "You may write buggy code, but I don’t" and "We don’t need techincal oversight". I think both of those statements are patently false, and they — and others like them — always take me back to that advice from my first manager, Chris Anderson, gave me way back in 1997:
Check your ego at the door.
It’s really easy to walk in to a coding review, a design session, or one of a myriad of other meetings with your ideas and think they’re the best. It’s also really easy to overlook the fact that other people in that room are also pretty intelligent — maybe even more so (it happens), and that we all have blindspots and weaknesses. In my experience, and I’ve certainly been on both sides more than I care to admit, many conflicts in software development are ego-driven. There’s a difference between being passionate about something and being an arrogant jerk. The latter type does nobody any good, so check your ego. Go in humbly, and see what there is to learn from your coworkers, even if you’re more senior than they. With that mindset, everyone will come out a winner.
The project I’m working on is using Mockk in the unit tests. It’s a great library that has made true unit testing so much easier. I ran into a problem, though, where I needed a method I was mocking to return the value it was receiving. To be more specific, we were passing an object to a Spring repository method that had been built inside the method to test, and, to test thoroughly, I needed to get to that object. Turns out, that’s pretty easy to do with Mockk. Let’s take a look…
Merry Christmas!
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. -- John 3:16
A user in #kotlin on Freenode asked how to run a Kotlin script. While the Kotlin docs are pretty clear on how to do that, I thought I’d make a quick post to show how to make an easily executable Kotlin script.
Sample quote
Quote source
My name is Jason Lee. I am a software developer living in the middle of Oklahoma. I’ve been a professional developer since 1997,
using a variety of languages, including Java, Javascript, PHP, Python, Delphi, and even a bit of C#. I currently work for Red Hat
on the WildFly/EAP team, where, among other things, I maintain integrations for some MicroProfile specs, OpenTelemetry, Micrometer,
Jakarta Faces, and Bean Validation. (Full resume here.
LinkedIn profile)
I am the president of the Oklahoma City JUG, and an occasional speaker at the JUG and a variety of technical conferences.
On the personal side, I’m active in my church, and enjoy bass guitar, running, fishing, and a variety of martial arts. I’m also married to a beautiful woman, and have two boys, who, thankfully, look like their mother.
