As part of some of my recent work, I’ve gotten some exposure to some Microprofile specs I’ve not had the opportunity or need to use. One of those is Fault Tolerance. I was curious to see it action, so I’ve cobbled together this simple example that demonstrates some of that spec’s features, namely retries and fallback.

Obviously, web apps need to be secured. If you’re brave (and some might say foolish), you can roll your own security. Unless you have compelling reasons to do so, however, you probably shouldn’t. Almost as if by design (nyuk nyuk), Quarkus makes it easy to use any OpenID Connect server. One such server is Keycloak, an open source offering also from Red Hat. If your experience is like mine, though, securing endpoints makes testing a touch more complicated. In this post, I’d like to present and walk through a complete example of a secured Quarkus app, using Keycloak, JUnit and Wiremock.

Merry Christmas! After what has been a tough year, my prayer is that this Christmas season will be relaxing and refreshing for us all. To help celebrate the season — I hope — I’ve embedded my church’s Christmas program, Christmas Under the Arches. My prayer is that it encourages you all and helps you focus on the Reason we celebrate. :)

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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.