I use RxJava a lot nowadays — back in the day before I joined Netflix I was struggling with it a bit and mostly watched from the sideline but nowadays I find myself pulling in that dependency in a lot of the Java code I’m writing. And I also use the Spock framework a lot […]
When dealing with OOP languages, composition over inheritance has been the preferred approach for a while now as it offers a greater flexibility in most cases. Before you start, I’m not going to get into that dispute whether one should opt for inheritance or not, enough to say that there are cases where composition is […]
At the end of another tough week in Netflix I look back at what I have achieved and what has been challenging in achieving it. I do wonder what I do looks like from the outside and I can’t really see how someone would make sense of my job. I sit in front of 3 (sometimes more!) […]
If you use gradle and docker you must have come across the gradle-docker-plugin. And if you started using it a lot you probably found out that more often than not your builds start using the same boilerplate code to prepare your microservices containers. And if you end up in that situation best thing to avoid boilerplate rubbish […]
I use PMD in my Gradle builds quite a bit. (Maybe a bit more nowadays that the FindBugs peeps seem to be struggling with that project — see this email from Andrey on this: https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-November/004321.html). The issue I had with it is that there is no way to quickly turn off their checks for the src/test/… […]
With the introduction of lambdas in Java (not so) recently, some argue that Groovy lost some of its thunder, as closures are now first class citizens in the JDK. However, as I’m about to show, while lambda’s pushed the Java language a great deal forward, Groovy still makes a lot of things incredibly easy (and […]
I’m going to spread some lovin’ today for the widely-used yet less appreciated feature in Groovy which allows creating a Java bean and setting its properties in one line. Especially when dealing with unit tests this saves me a great deal of time and frustration. If you ever worked with “pure” (??) Java beans, then […]
This is something that every now and then I have to do: check whether either one or all elements of a collection meet a certain criteria. The standard code initially in Java involved a for loop and iterating through the collection explicitly and checking the condition at each step. Then Apache Commons came on with their […]
If you ever programmed in Groovy language, you probably “enjoyed” (maybe without realising) the joys of DefaultGroovyMethods. What you probably don’t realise is that you can override these methods to customize your classes — and occasionally generate some code that’s not that easy to read. (Do you remember the old C++ way of overriding operators […]
With Java 8, Oracle introduced the concept of “default methods” in interfaces (and if you really haven’t heard of this — wtf?? — you can read more here about it: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/defaultmethods.html). This argue some is a step towards multiple inheritance and as such should be banished from the oh, so pure! Java language. Others point out […]
I’ve been using the above (and a few others like CodeNarc) code quality plugins for quite a bit and I thought I’d give my 2 cents here on a matter of style: the way you can suppress checks in each of these tools. I do like the way Checkstyle allows you to define what to […]
At Netflix, we made a name for ourselves for being a Java shop. A quick look at our Netflix OSS page on Github reveals a whole suite of projects all Java-based. However, apart from the Java projects that are going on in Netflix – and the JVM-based projects (we DO Groovy and Scala too!) – […]
Looking the other day through the JDK Enhancements Proposals (aka “JEP“) I came across JEP-269: “Convenience Factory Methods for Collections”. Oh hello, where have you been all these previous JDK releases? 🙂 It seems finally the Java world has woken up to what other JVM languages (and not only!) have been offering for a while: […]
I came across this the other day and I ended up spending quite some time on it pulling my hair and I still couldn’t explain it in the end so I thought I’d post here to see if anyone can shed some light into it. In brief, it’s about Groovy’s (otherwise awesome!) feature of comparing […]
I find myself nowadays mixing a lot of JVM languages: I write a lot of “core” code in Java, as I prefer the verbosity of it somehow, but then I find myself a lot of times I just need a lot of utilities or “quickies” around this code — be it for unit testing purposes […]
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