Recently I needed to add a progress bar to a Java based terminal/console application and I used a specific library that I’d like to demonstrate in the following snippet.

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Writing our manifest files for Kubernetes / Openshift often forces us to edit xml, json and yml files by hand.

A new library, ap4k allows to specify metadata for these manifest files directly in our Java code using annotations.

In the following short example I am going to demonstrate how to generate manifest files using Maven and ap4k.

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A lot of boilerplate code is written when developers need to test their applications with different connected systems like databases, stream platforms and other collaborators.

Docker allows to handle those dependencies but there is still some glue code required to bind the container’s lifecycle and the configuration to the concrete integration test.

Testcontainers is a testing library that offers lightweight throwaway instances of anything able to run in a Docker container, with bindings to configure the specific containers and also provides wrappers to manage our own custom containers.

In the following short tutorial I am going to demonstrate how to start Apache Kafka as well as a classical Postgresql database from a JUnit 5 integration test.

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It is interesting to see how the Java language evolves over time. One thing that I have always missed is pattern matching in a way similar to languages like Scala.

Now there are different JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEP) aiming at bringing us a little bit closer to pattern matching, especially JEP 325 aka Switch Expressions that are included in the current Java 12 preview or JEP 305 aka Pattern Matching for instanceof.

In the following article, I’d like to demonstrate how to use switch expressions in our applications.

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Reactive design or reactive architecture has an impact on how modern software systems are implemented. RSocket is a project that aims to adapt the benefits of the patterns described in the Reactive Manifesto and resulting tools like Reactive Streams or Reactive Extensions  to a formal new communication protocol.

RSocket works with TCP, WebSockets and Aeron transport layers and offers additional features like session resumption.

In the following tutorial I’m going to demonstrate how to implement simple client-server communication over TCP and Websockets for different interaction models like request-response, request-stream, fire-and-forget and event subscription.

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Arthas created by Alibaba is a tool that allows developers to connect to running Java applications without stopping them or suspending threads for debugging the application from the console.

It offers features like monitoring invocation statistics, searching for classes and methods in the classloaders, view method invocation details (like parameters), show the stack trace of a method invocation, monitor system metrics and others.

In the following examples I’m going to demonstrate some of these features applied to a running web application.

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Capacity planning is an important task when trying to anticipate resources and scaling factors for our applications.

The usl4j library offers us an easy abstraction for Neil J. Gunther’s Universal Scalability Law and allows us to build up a predictive model based on the parameters throughput, latency and concurrent operations.

With a basic input set of two of these parameters, we are able to predict how these values change if we change one input parameter so that we can build our infrastructure or systems according to our SLAs.

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The OpenAPI and Swagger API description format are becoming important standards to specify API contracts for RESTful web services and the Microservices trend pushes the need for such contracts even further.

Therefore arises the need for software architects, testers and developers to write tests to verify if an exposed API follows such a specified contract.

In the following tutorial I will demonstrate a setup with Java, Maven, JUnit and the designated contract-testing-library, assertj-swagger that verifies the validity of such a contract exposed by a Spring Boot application against a local stored definition.

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When implementing distributed systems, client-server architectures and simple applications with network related functionalities, everything is fine when we’re in the development or in the testing stage because the network is reliable and the communicating systems are not as stressed as they are in production.

But to sleep well we want to validate how resilient we have implemented our systems, how they behave when the network fails, the latency rises, the bandwidth is limited, connections time out and so on.

In the following tutorial I will demonstrate how to set up a testing environment to simulate different classical network problems with a tool named Toxiproxy and I will show how to integrate it with the well known Java testing stack with Maven and JUnit.

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JetstreamDB is a in-memory database engine for Java that claims to be built for ultra-high speed and the ability of managing complex data structures by storing real Java objects instead of serializing data structures to other database specific formats.

In the following short example I would like to demonstrate how to create and read items from such a database by building a small article management sample app.

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When we need to investigate the cause for a dysfunctional Java application we have a plethora of tools available that on the one hand help us in gathering information, artifacts and statistics and on the other hand help us in processing this information and identifying possible problems.

The following list of tools, snippets, workflows and information about specific artifacts could provide a starting point for analyzing such problems and covers topics like heap-dumps, thread-dumps, heap-histograms, heap-regions, garbage-collection-logs, hotspot-compiler/codecache-logs, debugging native-memory, tools for heap-dump-analysis, JVM unified logging and more..

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When writing test for applications that interact with Kafka brokers we often need to setup a decent environment including an instance of Kafka and ZooKeeper.

Though Kafka ships with some classes for testing, setting up a simple testing environment is quite easier with the kafka-unit library that offers JUnit test rule support or a fast programmatic setup within no time.

In the following short example, I’d like to show how create a simple setup using Maven, Surefire and kafka-unit. (more…)

A lot of features are already included in the Neo4j graph database system but sometimes we want to extends its capabilities and implement functions and procedures by ourselves that we may reuse.

In the following tutorial I will demonstrate how to implement a procedure for Neo4j, how to write and run tests using JUnit and an embedded graph database and last but not least how to setup Neo4j with Docker and our stored procedure installed in no time.

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Reactive Streams is an initiative trying to standardize asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking  back-pressure. With Java 9, new classes in the java.util.concurrent.flow package offer a semantically equivalent counterpart to this standard that may be adopted by other frameworks.

In the following short tutorial we’re implementing examples for reactive streams with Java 9 and the Flow API, with RxJava2, with Akka, with Reactor and finally there is an example in RxJava1, too though it does not follow the standard.

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Communicating with  identity and access management systems is a common task for many web-applications exposing secured resources.

Keycloak is an open source software that provides not also such authorization services but also offers a lot of features from Single-Sign-On, Identity-Brokering, Social-Login, User-Federation, multiple client-adapters up to the administration console or support for protocols like OpenID, SAML, OAuth2, Kerberos and more.

I will demonstrate how to integrate a Spring Boot web application with Keycloak and configure an authentication flow that requires a two-factor-authentication with user credentials and also one-time-passwords. (more…)

The Java Mission Control and the Java Flight Recorder allow us to capture run-time information from our Java applications without much overhead and aggregate profiling information.

I have written down the commands that I’m using the most when profiling a Java application with this tool chain in the following article.

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On the one hand adding dependencies to a project is easy, on the other hand securing a project and checking for vulnerable dependencies is way harder.

The OWASP dependency check plugin for Maven allows us to scan our project’s dependencies for know vulnerabilities.

I will demonstrate its usage in the following short example.

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Writing microbenchmarks for parts of our applications is not always easy – especially when the internals of the virtual machine, the just-in-time-compiler and such things are coming into effect.

Java Microbenchmark Harness is a tool that takes care of creating JVM warmup-cycles, handling benchmark-input-parameters and running benchmarks as isolated processes etc.

Now following a few short examples for writing microbenchmarks with JMH.
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Sometimes I need to resolve Maven dependencies programmatically. Eclipse Aether is a library for working with artifact repositories and I’ll be using it in the following example to read dependency trees from a given POM descriptor file and download each dependency from a remote Maven repository to a local directory.

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With JUnit 5 the possibilities to write parameterized tests have changed and improved a lot.

The following short overview covers all new types of possible parameter sources for JUnit 5 tests as well as the new conversion API for test arguments.

In addition we’re showing how parameterized tests were written in JUnit 4.

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Maintaining architecture rules and constraints for a specific software project or an application is not easy as textual documentation is easily forgotten after a while and hard to verify.

ArchUnit is a testing library that allows developers and software architects to write down such rules as executable tests that may be run by the development teams and the integration servers.

In the following article I will demonstrate the basic features of this library by applying rules and constraints to an existing application.

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In our tests we often need to create a bunch of test-objects that are populated with random-data. This data needs to follow specific rules as identifiers need to be unique or must be incremented, string-properties must follow special conventions and so on. In the following short tutorial I will demonstrate how to generate such test data using the Fixture Factory library. (more…)

Google’s Macaroons are a mechanism to establish distributed authorization. The distinction to the classical bearer-token is their ability that they may be used to perform an action under certain restrictions and may then be used to create a new macaroon with stricter restrictions.

The following short tutorial demonstrates how to create macaroons, serialize and deserialize them, add first- and third-party caveats and finally to verify them.

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Playing around with the new module system in Java 9 I simply wanted to write down how to achieve the most basic tasks.

Therefore I created the following module how-to based upon a simple demonstration project consisting of two dependant modules.

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There is a new testing framework out there called Karate that is build on top of the popular Cucumber framework.

Karate makes it easy to script interactions with out web-services under test and verify the results. In addition it offers us a lot of useful features like parallelization, script/feature re-use, data-tables, JsonPath and XPath support, gherkin syntax, switchable staging-configurations and many others.

In the following tutorial we’ll be writing different scenarios and features for a real-world RESTful web-service to demonstrate some of its features.

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Drools is a slim Business Rules Management System (BRMS) solution with different integrations and tools available.

In the following short snippet I’d like to demonstrate how to integrate a simple rule engine into an application using this library.

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When dealing with remote services or APIs there is always the risk of latency issues, failures or connection losses. The worst thing to happen is when the remote service is down and our application hangs until the underlying protocol’s (e.g. TCP) connection timeout is reached and we’re receiving an exception. Until this moment is reached, our application might hang, memory is allocated for threads or bound objects and at last, our continuous requests might prevent the remote system from recovering.

We might use timeouts here but circuit-breakers take this approach one step further: A potential failing, critical or dangerous operation is encapsulated with a circuit breaker tracking failures and when a specified threshold is reached it tripping the breaker.  Now all calls to the API fail immediately and the  system does not even try to communicate with the failing remote system or the isolated API.
This avoids  flooding a  dead remote system with requests and allocating memory and system resources for waiting threads etc. and is also a good mechanism and  integration point to track business-critical errors.

In the following tutorial I’m going to demonstrate four different circuit-breaker implementations for Java forced to interact with a failing API.

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When it comes to web-services (especially RESTful web-services), configuration files or other data-descriptors, the JavaScript Object Notation, short: JSON is often used as format of choice.

As the task arises to transform these JSON structures, I have seen a variety of different approaches from converting JSON into XML using JAX-B, applying XSLT,  transforming into JSON again on the one hand to loading JSON structures into Hash-maps of Hash-maps (..) and manually removing single elements from these collections on the other hand.

JOLT is a library to make this task easier for us: It allows us to note down different types of transformations in a specification file in JSON syntax and to apply this specification to given JSON structures with ease.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to use this library by transforming JSON structures programmatically with a few lines of code, by filtering a RESTful web-service using JOLT and a servlet filter and finally by adding a short example using the Apache Camel framework.

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When important data is written to STDIN/STDOUT and an application relies on specific system properties or environment variables, writing tests is getting more complicated.

System Rules is a collection of JUnit rules that helps us writing Java tests for everything that deals with java.lang.System.

In the following short examples I’d like to demonstrate how to deal with system properties, environment variables, STDOUT and STDERR and capturing both for testing e.g. for some golden master refactoring.

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When it comes to writing microservices in Java, plenty of tools and frameworks exist. In the following tutorial, I’d like to demonstrate another minimalistic framework called Bootique by implementing a simple microservice exposing its functions either as a RESTful web-service or as a runnable command executed using the command line. (more…)

When building up search engines, indexing tons of data into a schema-less, distributed data store, Elasticsearch has always been a favourite tool of mine.

In addition to its core features, it also offers tools and documentation for us developers when we need to write integration tests for our Elasticsearch powered Java applications.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to implement a small sample application using Elasticsearch under the hood and how to write integration-tests with these tools for this application afterwards.

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When integrating a Neo4j database into a Java application a developer often needs to map nodes and edges of the graph to corresponding Java classes of the domain model.

Neo4j OGM eases this work and allows us to map our domain objects to the graph database using simple annotations – similar to the Java Persistence API (JPA) for relational database management systems.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to use Neo4j OGM to build a simple train timetable planner and a permission system mapping between graph, nodes, edges and POJOs.

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When writing applications that interchange information with LDAP directory services there is always the need to write integration tests for these components and services.

Therefore we need a the possibility to start-up an embedded LDAP server, fill it with test-data and control its life-cycle during the test-phases.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate two candidates that fulfil this purpose, the ApacheDS test integrations and a small library named embedded-ldap-junit.

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The MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol developed in 1999 that experiences a growing popularity due to trends like the Internet-of-Things and the need to exchange information between low powered devices with aspects as CPU and bandwidth usage in mind.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to set-up a broker for this protocol with the help of the Moquette library and how to create a client and publish messages for a specific topic using this broker and Eclipse Paho as client library.

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Writing tests not only to verify the behaviour of a web site but also the correctness of its layout especially for responsive websites is not always easy.

Luckily the Galen Framework eases the task of writing layout tests for us, offering a specialized domain-specific-language to write layout-specifications, it integrates well with Selenium Grid, Sauce Labs or BrowserStack, it offers an easy way to deal with different browser sizes and responsive designs and it generates nice, detailed test reports.

In the following tutorial I’m going to implement a JUnit test for the layout of a blog article of mine to demonstrate Galen’s basic features and the integration of it with JUnit and the Maven build tool.

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Though having written about other configuration management libraries for Java before, I would like to demonstrate another one today: Netflix Archaius.

Archaius offers some nice features like dynamic typed properties, thread-safe operations, an event system for property changes/updates, a JMX MBean to read and update properties and adaptors for a variety of dynamic configuration sources like Amazon DynamoDB, JDBC, URLs and Apache ZooKeeper.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to read and update application configuration properties with Archaius and data sources like property-files, system-properties, JMX and Apache ZooKeeper.

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OAuth2 is a frequently used standard for authorization and with Spring Boot it is easy to set up authorization and resource server in no time.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to set up an OAuth2 authorization server as well as a connected and secured resource server within a few minutes using Java, Maven and Spring Boot.

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Generating test suites for existing code allows us to verify the behaviour of an application before we’re making changes to its code base or for regression testing.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to derive test suites from an existing Java application using EvoSuite and the EvoSuite Maven plug-in.

EvoSuite offers some nice features like running in a sandbox to avoid dangerous operations, virtual file-system and network and optimizing of different coverage criteria.

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When writing tests for our software components sometimes we need to mock external services based on the HTTP protocol, might it be a RESTful web-service, an XML-RPC call or a simple GET request to some web-server.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to create a mock HTTP server for testing and how to bootstrap and bind it to the life-cycle of a classical build-management tool like Maven.

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The Reactive Manifesto specifies responsive, resilient, elastic and message-driven as attributes for a reactive application.

When implementing specific mechanisms to achieve this requirements, we often need to deal with timeout and retry-operations in our application and depending on our setup and environment, different tools and libraries exist to help us here.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to handle exceptions and operation retries on service boundaries with a lesser know, slim library named Retry4j.

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We all love the simplicity when chaining commands and pipes in an Unix derivative environment.

UStream takes this approach and extends Java 8′s stream API to mimic some of the well known commands and apply them on streams.

In the following tutorial, I’d like to share some slim examples for using UStream.

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For us developers there plenty of libraries exist helping us in deriving and generating clients for existing RESTful web-services and I have already covered some of the in this blog (e.g. the JAX-RS Client API). Nevertheless, I’d like to share my experience with another interesting lightweight library here: Netflix Feign.

Feign offers a nice fluent-builder API, a rich integration for  common libraries and APIs like JAX-RS, Jackson, GSON, SAX, JAX-B, OkHttp, Ribbon, Hystrix, SLF4J and more and last bot not least, it is setup easy and the service contracts are specified using interfaces and annotations.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to derive a service binding from a simple, JAX-RS based RESTful web-service, how to create the service adapter using the integrated builder and at last, performing CRUD operations.

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Promises may help us when dealing with asynchronous code and we need to merge, pipe or track the progress and the results of single parts of computation in our applications.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate a small library, JDeferred that helps us for this specific use case.

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Writing tests for asynchronous applications has never been much fun as we’re always struggling with the problem how to determine state changes, handle process terminations, dealing with timeouts or failures and stuff like this.

Awaitility eases this process for us offering a nice DSL, rich support for languages like Scala or Groovy and an easy-to-use syntax that’s even more fun when using it with Java 8′s lambda expressions.

In the following short introduction I’d like to demonstrate writing some tests different scenarios.

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These days where a cheap GPU for about 100 € is capable to create 3 billion of MD5 Hashes per second, we need not only need to use salts the right way but we also need to choose a strong, non-reversible and slow hashing schemes when storing passwords in our application.

Heimdall is a library that implements a secure and upgradable password hashing mechanism and uses at the time of writing this article PBKDF2 SHA-1 HMAC with 20000 iterations and a 192 bit (24 byte) salt per default.

In the following short examples I’d like to demonstrate how to create password hashes, how to verify passwords and how to check if a password hash needs to be recreated using a more secure algorithm.

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Spring Boot allows us to create RESTful web-services with ease, Swagger specifies a format to describe the capabilities and operations of these services and with Swagger UI it is possible to explore our REST API with a nice graphical user interface in our browser.

Springfox is a project that aims at creating automated JSON API documentation for API’s built with Spring and is used in the following tutorial to integrate Swagger into a sample application.

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A variety of different tools exists to help us analyze RESTful web-services and create documentations for their APIs in different formats.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to document an existing JAX-RS web-service in multiple formats like Swagger, AsciiDoc or Plain Text using Maven, the JAX-RS Analyzer and the JAX-RS Analyzer Maven Plugin.

The JAX-RS Analyzer gathers its information not only by reflection like most other tools but also by bytecode analysis and therefore does not require us to add special annotations for documentation to our code.

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Mutation testing makes an interesting addition to the classical test coverage metrics.

They seed mutations (errors) into the code, run the project’s tests afterwards and if the tests fail, the mutation is killed – otherwise it lived and we have a possible indication of an issue with our tests.

In the following short tutorial. I’d like to demonstrate how to setup mutation tests with the PIT/Pitest library and Maven and generate reports.

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Using immutable objects in Java (and other programming languages as well) is a good thing because immutable objects may be shared safely, are thread-safe and reduce the risk of side effects in your applications.

Nowadays multiple frameworks exist to reduce the need of writing boilerplate code here but there is one special framework whose features I’d like to demonstrate in the following short tutorial.

It hooks into your application using annotation processing and generates type-safe builders, toString, hashCode, equals methods for you, supports lazy attributes, singleton instances, serialization into data-formats like JSON and a lot of other features,too.

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Sometimes when writing an application we might consider using an in-memory file system to speed up data access or to create some kind of cache.

There are different libraries to help us here but one looks especially promising for me because it supports almost every functionality of the Java NIO File APIs added in Java 7 – from creating, reading, deleting files and directory to handling symbolic and hard links or watching directory changes with a WatchService.

In the following short tutorial, I’d like to demonstrate how to setup an in-memory file system within a few minutes and how to access directories and files stored in this file system.

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For the most of us developers, generating Java source files is an occasionally happening task and we’re dealing with it e.g. when writing annotation processors, writing tools or interacting with meta-data files.

JavaPoet is a nice library to simplify such tasks, offering an intuitive fluent-builder API to generate source files in no time.

In the following tutorial I’d like to share a few examples by writing code generators with the help of this library.

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When it comes to indexing in a Neo4j graph database, different options exist for a developer to create and maintain the index.

In the following short examples I’d like to demonstrate different possibilities for index management.

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When there is the need to create load tests or performance tests for an application, Apache JMeter is a handy tool and set up with ease.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to configure JMeter to log into a Java EE web application with multiple users specified in a CSV file, how to generate some basic reports and how to integrate JMeter into a mavenized build using the JMeter Maven Plugin.

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Having written about the basics of using Cucumber in a Java project in my last blog article, I now would like to demonstrate how to use a similar setup in a Java EE web project with Arquillian and the Cukespace library.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to write a full Java EE web application and add BDD-style tests to the project so that we’re able to test our business layer on the one hand and the user interface on the other hand using Arquillian Drone and Selenium.

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Whether behaviour-driven-development, specification by example or acceptance test driven development is the goal, the Cucumber framework eases our life when we need to  establish a link between the non-technical, textual description for a new feature and the tests that prove that the application fulfils these requirements.

In the following short tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to add Cucumber to a Java project and how to write feature descriptions and test-cases for each step of these descriptions. (more…)

Especially when it comes to testing, setting up a decent environment for a secured Java EE web application isn’t always an easy thing to do.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to create a secured web application using form-based authentication and a JDBC realm to fetch users and roles and how to run the application in an embedded container for testing and development.

Additionally I’d like to show how to write and run integration tests to verify the security setup using a setup of Maven, Embedded GlassFish, Arquillian, jUnit and rest-assured.

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Having written two articles about different websocket based chat server implementations in Java, I was recently asked how an implementation of the client side would look like in Java.

That’s why I added this article to demonstrate how to create a websocket chat client applications within a few steps with the Java API for Websocket.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to write a text-based chat client for the console first and afterwards we’re going to program a chat client with a graphical user interface, implemented in JavaFX.

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Apache Camel not only is one of my favourite frameworks ever but it also allows the humble developer to create a full blown chat bot within a few lines of code and using the Camel XMPP component.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to create a simple chat bot and since Atlassian’s HipChat basic plan is now free for unlimited users, we’re using HipChat as our play- and testing ground for the bot.

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Recently I needed to modify some excel files and to add some aggregated formula fields to a sheet and the following snippet did the work for me.

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Because a lot of my current projects are using JAX-RS in different versions I’d like to write down and share some frequently used snippets for implementing RESTful web-services with the JAX-RS specification here.

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There are several ways to aggregate and report application performance indicators in a Java application. One common way here is to use Java Management Extensions (JMX) and MBeans.

The Yammer Metrics Library eases this task for us and simplifies the aggregation of different reports.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to set up a full Java EE 7 web application by the help of Maven archetypes and we’re running the application on WildFly application server that is downloaded and configured completely by the WildFly Maven Plugin.

Finally our application is going to use the Java API for JSON Processing to parse lists of public repositories from the Bitbucket REST API to aggregate different reports, exported via JMX so that we’re finally able to view these reports with jconsole or jmeter.

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I have written about other database migration frameworks before but in this article I’d like to cover the Liquibase framework in combination with WildFly as Java EE 7 compatible application server.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to write a full Java EE 7 book store application with a few steps and with Liquibase on board to create the database structure and insert example data into the database.

Thanks to the WildFly Maven Plug-in we even do not need to download and configure the application server but let Maven and the plug-in do the work for us.

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XMLBeam is an interesting library using an approach of projecting parts of an XML DOM tree into Java using some simple interfaces, annotations and XPath expressions.

In the following article, I’d like to share three experiments of mine with this library for reading, writing XML and parsing a live RSS feed.

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Lucene is my favourite search engine library and the more often I use it in my projects the more features or functionality I find that were unknown to me.

Two of those features I’d like to share in the following tutorial is one the one hand the possibility to specify different analyzers on a per-field basis and on the other hand the API to create a simple character based tokenizer and analyzer within a few steps.

Finally we’re going to create a small index- and search application to test both features in a real scenario.

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When you need to derive meta-models from existing databases and want to create type-safe queries with an elegant, fluent-API, jOOQ definitely is a tool to consider here.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to integrate the jOOQ meta-model generator into a Maven build using the jOOQ Maven Plug-in, the Build Helper Maven Plug-in and Maven profiles to finally create a running application to query an existing RDBMS using such a generated meta-model.

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Using dependency injection and aspect-oriented mechanisms like interceptors allow us to separate cross-cutting-concerns in our Java enterprise application, to control global aspects of our application and to avoid boilerplate code.

In the following short tutorial we’re going to create an aspect-oriented logger to protocol the initiating user, class and method called and the parameters passed to the method and finally we’re adding this interceptor to a sample RESTful web-service by adding a simple annotation.

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There’s a variety of configuration frameworks to use in our Java applications. Java Config Builder is one of them and it offers some nice features that I would like to demonstrate in the following short examples as are:

Loading values from different sources like property-files, environment variables, command-line-arguments or system properties, specifying default values, mapping arbitrary types or collections, merging configurations and using the Java Bean Validation standard aka JSR-303.

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Recently in a project I encountered the following problem: The development team used Git with a branch-per-feature-like workflow and the integration server, Bamboo in this case, was configured not only to run the integration-tests for the master-branch but also for every change in a feature branch.

As the team  developed a Java EE web application ports like 8080 occasionally were already bound and builds failed.

I knew a plug-in for Jenkins CI I to search for available ports and assign them to a build variable but I wanted to control such information directly within the Maven build life-cycle so I searched and finally found Sonatype’s Port Allocator Plug-in for Maven.

In the following short example I’m going to demonstrate how to allocate available random ports in a Maven build and assign them to an embedded servlet container.

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Using the Java Persistence API and a decent persistence provider allows us to configure and fine-tune when and how the second level cache is used in our application.

In the following short examples, we’re going to demonstrate those features written as JUnit test cases and running on a H2 in-memory database.

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Apache Avro is a serialization framework similar to Google’s Protocol Buffers or Apache Thrift and offering features like rich data structures, a compact binary format, simple integration with dynamic languages and more.

In the following short five minute tutorial, we’re going to specify a schema to serialize books in a JSON format, we’re using the Avro Maven plugin to generate the stub classes and finally we’re serializing the data into a single file.

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Querydsl is a framework that allows us to create elegant, type-safe queries for a variety of different data-sources like Java Persistence API (JPA) entities, Java Data Objects (JDO), mongoDB with Morphia, SQL, Hibernate Search up to Lucene.

In the following tutorial we’re implementing example queries for different environments – Java Persistence API compared with a JPQL and a criteria API query, mongoDB with Morphia and last but not least for Lucene.

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Parboiled is a modern. lightweight and easy to use library to parse expression grammars in Java or Scala and in my humble opinion it is perfect for use cases where you need something between regular expressions and a complex parser generator like ANTLR.

In the following tutorial we’re going to create a simple grammar to specify a task list and write an implementation of a parser also as unit tests for each grammar rule in Java.

Additionally, we’re using the Scala variant of Parboiled to build up an Abstract Syntax Tree parser and analyze a given task list with it.

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JAX-RS 2.0 aka JSR 339 not also specifies the API to build up a RESTful webservice but also enhances the client side API to easen up the process of writing a client for a REST service.

In the following tutorial we’re building up a client for a ready-to-play REST service and explore the different new options e.g. how to handle requests in a synchronous or asynchronous way, how to add callback handlers for a request, how to specify invocation targets to build up requests for a later execution or how to filter the client-server communication using client request filters and client response filters.

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Vert.x is a modern, lightweight framework to build high performance applications running on the Java Virtual Machine. The framework is polyglot so that you’re able to write your application in Java, Groovy, Ruby, Python or even JavaScript.

In addition it offers a nice component system, an actor-like concurrency model a distributed event bus and an elegant API to create scalable applications in no time.

In the following tutorial we’re going to build a websocket chat by creating a HTTP server and the websocket server using Vert.x, Java and Maven.

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MongoDB is matured, document-oriented, cross-platform NoSQL database system with drivers available for a bunch of different programming languages.

In the following short examples I’m going to write some integration tests for MongoDB using the MongoDB Java driver and the Flapdoodle library to create an embedded MongoDB instance for testing.

We’re going to write tests for a simple persist-and-query scenarion and for a map-reduce function and in addition I’m going to show how to bind the start and stop of a MongoDB  instance to a Maven goal using the embedmongo-maven-plugin.

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Many articles have been written about JSR 335 aka Lambda Expressions for the Java^TM Programming Language but I like to try new things out for myself and that’s why I’d like to share my snippets here.

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Having tried a bunch of workflow engines and business processing management platforms I now have given the Activiti framework a try.

I immediately liked the good test support using annotations and jUnit test rules, a straight API and the good Eclipse IDE integration as well as I liked the Activiti Explorer and the Activiti REST Application and the feeling to achieve quick results with less effort when using this framework.

In the following tutorial I’m going to an example BPMN process for an issue request process using different components like Groovy script tasks, service tasks written in Java, E-Mail service tasks and form builders.

Finally I’m showing how to write a full integration test for the process and how to run the process in a web application environment using the Activiti Explorer application.

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The Templating Maven Plugin looks useful if one needs to copy and to filter source files in a project e.g. to add property values from the build environment to a class.

For a short demonstration I’ve added the following short snippet.

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Java EE 7 is out now and so I was curious to play around with the new specifications and APIs from in this technology stack.

That’s why I didn’t hesitate to add yet another websocket-chat tutorial to the existing ones on the internet in favour of gathering some experience with this technology and a possible integration using a GlassFish 4 server, the new Java API for JSON Processing for data serialization combined with custom websocket encoders/decoders and finally adding some Bootstrap and jQuery on the client side.

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Recently I needed to control an embedded web container from a Java application and I wanted to see how this could be achieved using an embedded instance of either Tomcat or Jetty here.

In the following short examples I would like to show how to embed both servers in an application in no  time using Gradle or Maven as build tool.

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Feature flags are a common technique, often combined with continuous deployment and delivery and they allow us to rollback a specific feature, to create A/B tests or to rollout a specific feature for a specific test group, a specific amount of users or dedicated systems.

In the following short examples I’d like you to demonstrate how easy it is to implement feature flags with the Togglz framework with a few steps in a Java EE environment.

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It’s been a long way for Java FX from the days of the F3 project the current release 2.2. Today there are many options how to create a Java FX application .. you may be using Java, Scala, Groovy or Visage, you may create your application in a programmatic way using the comfortable integrated builders or you may create your views using XML layouts and easy data-bindings with a few annotations.

If you need to bind your UI component properties to a specific application state, there’s a nice properties- and bindings API that makes your life easier.

In the following tutorial, I’m going to create a simple game application – one version using FXML templates, model- and controller classes and using external stylesheets – the other version as a programmatic version in one java class.

Finally I’m showing how easy it is to create a shippable application either as runnable jar or as Java Web Start/JNLP application by using Gradle and the Java FX Plugin for Gradle.

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I really love Arquillian to run integration tests for my Java EE applications – especially when running on different containers – and I also love the Arquillian tool stack from Arquillian Drone to the Arquillian Persistence Extensions.

Today I’d like to share a short snippet how to achieve transaction rollbacks when testing an EJB in combination with Arquillian and the Arquillian Transaction Extension…

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Recently I needed a quick solution to deploy a Java EE 6 web application on a GlassFish instance automatically and subsequent to a successful build of the project on the integration server.

It took only a few steps using Jenkins, Maven and the Cargo plugin and I’d like to share this quick solution with you here.

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Apache Pivot is a modern framework to create rich clients as desktop applications or to run in a web browser.

It offers nice GUI elements, supports XML/WTKX templates, data bindings, JVM scripting languages and much more.

In the following short examples I’m going to create a desktop application to open a file browser, select a file and output the selected file’s name, first using a programmatic approach to create the user interface, and afterwards using XML/WTKX templates.

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Database migrations often are a necessity in the application development and maintenance life-cycle.

Whenever we need to apply changes to the database structure, insert new data fragments and in doing so want to be sure that this all happens with some control and versioning.

The following tutorial shows how implement this for a simple Java EE 6 web application to be run on a GlassFish application server in a few quick steps using the Flyway framework, an eager initialized Singleton EJB and some Maven wiring.

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One common question that you may encounter one day when using object-relational-mapping in your application is how to slim down data that you’re retrieving from the persistence layer down to a specific subset for your use-case in an efficient manner and without using complex additional mapping frameworks. In some situations you might declare lazy loaded fields but another approach that I’d like to share with you here are JPA2 constructor expressions.

Constructor expressions allow us to create plain old java objects from the result of an JPA query. The advantage is that we may use different projections for different scenarios and without being managed, the POJOs might help us save some resources here.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to persist 100 book entities with multiple properties to an embedded database and we’re using constructor expressions afterwards to create smaller POJOs using a subset of the information available from each persisted book.

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I recently stumbled upon a nice framework that allows to convert simple JUnit tests into micro benchmarks named JUnitBenchmarks.

It allows to set basic benchmark options and and to generate charts by adding some simple annotations and a test rule to your tests.

One might argue if it is wise to mix the aspects, testing and benchmarking and I’d agree for sure – nevertheless I think this framework can be handy sometimes so let’s create some benchmarks using JUnit and JUnitBenchmarks..

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The ability to attach lifecycle events to an entity using simple annotations sometimes is a neat feature in the Java Persistence API.

The following short snippets demonstrate how to bind and trigger the different available lifecycle events using an embedded derby database and a bunch of annotations.

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When there is XML to be parsed sometimes we’re chosing a DOM parser, sometimes a SAX parser and sometimes we’re using an XML pull parser, especially on Android.

The following short snippet shows how to use the xpp3 xml pull parse to fetch some information in xml format from a public issue tracker and to extract issue details.

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Sometimes we need to classify the tests in a project and a possible solution to achieve this goal is to assign different categories to the tests.

Often we’re doing this to separate the execution of fast-running and long-running tests or to run a specific set of tests that is only applicable in special situations.

To run a specific set of categorized tests there are different options and in the following tutorial we’ll be covering two of them: by configuring the Maven Surefire Plug-in or by using a JUnit Test Suite and the JUnit annotations.

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Encountering the situation that you want to extract meta-data or content from a file – might it be an office document, a spreadsheet or even a mp3 or an image – or you’d like to detect the content type for a given file then Apache Tika might be a helpful tool for you.

Apache Tika supports a variety of document formats and has a nice, extendable parser and detection API with a lot of built-in parsers available.

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JUnit is one of the most popular testing frameworks out there. Version 4.11 has just been released and offers some nice improvements that you shouldn’t miss.

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There are a lot of frameworks out there to create offline applications and rich clients in Java.

One exotic alternative is to use the HTML, CSS and Javascript for this purpose and render the application in a Java frame using SWT and SWT’s browser component.

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Everyday we’re writing tests for our software and sometimes we’re in a situation where we’re testing a specific type or object very often.

Luckily Hamcrest allows us to create custom matchers by subclassing from a given variety of available matchers.

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The HTML5 working draft describes different techniques to push information from a server to the client and the one described in this tutorial are Server-Send Events (SSE).

Using Server-Send-Events eliminates the need to poll a server periodically for information using AJAX and is really easy to implement because of the simple specification and the fact that nearly all modern browsers already implement this specification.

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In Lucene 4.x there is an API to fetch index statistics for specific document’s fields.

The following examples shows how to create an index with some random documents and fetch some statistics for a field afterwards ..

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The latest snippet from my Lucene examples demonstrates how to achieve a facet search using the Lucene 4.0 API and how easy it is to define multiple category paths to aggregate search results for different possible facets.

In the following example we’re indexing some books as a classical example and create multiple category paths for author, publication date and category afterwards ..

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Happy news for us, Theresa and I we’ve won the Atlassian Codegeist Competition 2012 with our Stash Readme Parser Plugin in the category: Best Stash Plugin.

We had two other plugins in the game, the Stash QR Code Plugin and the HTTP Request Workflow Function for Jira.

If you’re interested please take a look at the plugins in the Atlassian Marketplace our funny looking Pirate Ninja Unicorn Website or the project’s overview in my blog.

• Pirate Ninja Unicorn Website
• Atlassian Codegeist Website
• Atlassian Blog: Announcing the Winners
• Atlassian Marketplace: Stash Readme Parser Plugin
• Atlassian Marketplace: Stash QR Code Plugin
• Atlassian Marketplace: HTTP Request Workflow Function for Jira

Often in the life of a developer there is the need to create a windows executable for a Java application that is build and packaged in a Jar file.

The following short example shows how to create an executable Jar first and a windows executable containing vendor information, a nice icon and other stuff afterwards by using a combination of the Maven Shade Plugin and the launch4j Plugin for Maven.

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Having written some e-mail handling, sending or receiving library you’d like to run some integration tests against a real mail server?

Then GreenMail might help you out here .. the framework is not quite new on the market but it is really easy to setup IMAP,SMTP or POP3 services with it and it comes with some helpful libraries making your life a bit easier here.

That’s why I’ve come to the idea to share some examples for setting up different server instances, creating user accounts and – at last – fetching and validating e-mails…

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Functional programming is a trending topic these days and a lot of Java programmers are hot for the features that modern functional programming languages might offer.

Waiting for Java 8 and native closure support is a nice thing but for now we’re going to take a look at several Java frameworks that are trying to implement typical structures from those functional languages where possible using the capabilities of the Java language to emulate elements like higher-order-functions, closures, options and others …

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Creating cronjobs or scheduled service executions is made really easy in Java EE 6. Scheduled tasks may be created in a programmatical style or simply by adding some annotations to an EJB.

In the following tutorial we’re creating some simple scheduled tasks and let them run on an embedded GlassFish instance using the Maven Embedded GlassFish plugin..

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Many programmers have suffered when trying to setup an environment to handle updates for their application without much effort. Some tried Java Web Start for this purpose and many encountered difficulties with this approach.

Now there is getdown that aims to replace Java Web Start by offering a simple architecture to handle updates that is fast, realiable and the only thing you need is a normal http server. Though getdown lets us handle our updates really easy it is possible to make this process even easier with the getdown maven plugin.

In the following example we’re building a simple swing application to be installed, updated and launched using getdown.

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Now that the long awaited stable version of the Arquillian framework is released I wanted to demonstrate some interesting features of  this framework that really eases writing and running of integration tests for Java EE 6 applications in many different ways.

In the following tutorial we are going to create some real-world examples using Enterprise JavaBeans, Contexts and Dependency Injection, the Java Persistence API and we’re finally running Drone/Selenium tests against a JEE Web Application that is using Java Server Faces.

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The OSGi Blueprint Container specification allows us to use dependency injection in our OSGi environment, declarative import and export of OSGi services, registering lifecycle listeners and wiring dependencies into our services with a few lines of XML code.
In the following tutorial we’re first building an OSGi bundle classical style and afterwards take a trip into the advantages of the Blueprint specification.

Our OSGi container of choice here will be Apache Karaf a lightweight container with a lot of nice features and – of course – blueprint enabled…

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In today’s tutorial we’re exploring the world of faceted searches like the one we’re used to see when we’re searching for an item on Amazon.com or other websites. We’re using Hibernate Search here that offers an API to perform discrete as well as range faceted searches on our persisted data.

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Having just returned from the Atlassian Camp 2012 I just toyed around with Java and Scala and wanted to share the following snippet that demonstrates how to mix code from both languages in a Maven project using the maven-scala-plugin.

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Since I got a new tablet running Android 4.0 aka ice cream sandwich I wanted to play around a bit with the fragments API and creating an application for a tablet.

In the following tutorial, we’re going to build an application that renders several articles from a popular tech blog (just kidding) in a web view.

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A lot has changed since Selenium RC and WebDriver has given us a new syntax to write tests for our web pages. PageObjects add an abstraction to the pages under test and finally we’re able to programatically start Selenium server instances and use them to run the tests.

In the following tutorial, we’re writing some tests using PageObjects, WebDriver, Selenium Server and finally we’re even taking some screenshots of our tested web pages..

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JUnit Rules are a handy solution if one needs to alter test methods or wants to share common functionality between several test cases. JUnit 4.10 introduced a new class to order several rules according to our needs using a so called rule-chain.

In the following example, we’re going to create a simple custom rule and afterwards bind several instances of it in a specified order to a test method.

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Often we’re writing an application that has to handle entities that – on the one side need to be persisted in a relational database using standards like the Java Persistence API (JPA) and using frameworks like Hibernate ORM or EclipseLink.

On the other side those entities and their fields are often stored in a highspeed indexer like Lucene. From this situation arises a bunch of common problems .. to synchronize both data sources, to handle special data mapped in an entity like an office document and so on..

Hibernate Search makes this all a lot easier for us as we’re hopefully going to see in the following short tutorial…

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Often in the life of developer’s life there is a scenario where using a relational database tends to get complicated or sometimes even slow – especially when there are fragments with multiple relationships or multiple connections present. This often leads to complex database queries or desperate software engineers trying to handle those problems with their ORM framework.

A possible solution might be to switch from a relational database to a graph database – and – neo4j is our tool of choice here. In the following tutorial we’re going to implement several examples to demonstrate the strengths of a graph database .. from a route planner to a social graph.

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The more smartphones and tablets are sold the bigger the need for a mobile version of a modern website. PrimeFaces Mobile helps us developers here  and allows us to quickly create mobile websites that display well on an iPhone, Android, Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others.

In the following tutorial we’re going to create a web application that is using Java Server Faces 2.1, PrimeFaces 3.1 and PrimeFaces Mobile 1.0 and runs on a simple web container like Tomcat or Jetty.

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Using reusable styles and themes to modify an Android application’s look is really easy and helps to not violate thy DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle by typing styles in every single UI element again and again.

In the following tutorial we’re going to write and apply some simple styles and a finally theme to a simple Android application.

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In today’s tutorial we’re going to take a look on how to handle periodically scheduled tasks on our Android device by using BroadcastReceivers, Services and the AlarmManager.

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The MemoryAnalyzer Plugin for Eclipse allows us to quickly analyze heap dumps from a virtual machine and search for memory leaks. In the following tutorial we’re going to create and run a small application that is going to cause an OutOfMemoryException during its runtime.

In addition, we’re forcing the virtual machine to save a heap dump and finally analyzing this data using Eclipse and the MemoryAnalyzer plugin.

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There are many frameworks out there to facilitate testing RESTful webservices but there is one framework I’d like to acquaint you with my favourite framework named REST-assured.

REST-assured offers a bunch of nice features like a DSL-like syntax, XPath-Validation, Specification Reuse, easy file uploads and those features we’re going to explore in the following article.

With a few lines of code and Jersey I have written a RESTful web service that allows us to explore the features of the REST-assured framework and to run tests against this service.

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The Tomcat Maven Plugin not only allows us to deploy our mavenized application to an existing Tomcat server but also to run our web application with an embedded instance from our project’s directory. Recently I needed to add basic authentication to such an instance and wanted to share the steps necessary here

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In today’s Android tutorial we’re going to take a look at Android’s Widget API and how to make a widget interact with a service using intents.

We’re going to create a fully functional application that allows us to enable or disable our smartphone’s screen lock settings using a widget that can be placed on our  home screen.

Finally I am going to show how to use a smartphone to test and debug our application and connect it to the IDE.

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Today we’re going to take a look at the Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin and how it allows us quick creation of GlassFish server instances in no time and Java EE 6 application deployment.

With a few lines of configuration in your Maven’s pom.xml we’ve got a running GlassFish instance and are able to  redeploy our application fast by pressing enter in our console.

In the following tutorial we’re going to build a Java EE 6 Web Application with a stateless session bean and a web servlet and finally deploy – and redeploy the application using the Maven GlassFish Plugin.

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Today we’re going to take a look at two specific frameworks that enables you to efficiently test your REST-ful services: On the one side there is the framework REST-assured that offers a nice DSL-like syntax to create well readable tests – on the other side there is the Jersey-Test-Framework that offers a nice execution environment and is built upon the JAX-RS reference implementation, Jersey.

In the following tutorial we’re going to create a simple REST service first and then implement integration tests for this service using both frameworks.

The title of this article might be misleading due to the fact that I am not going to compare both frameworks to choose a winner, just showing the different approach ..

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Sometimes in a developer’s life there is no clean API available to gather information from a web application .. no SOAP, no XML-RPC and no REST .. just a website hiding the information we’re looking for somewhere in its DOM hierarchy – so the only solution is screenscraping.

Screenscraping always leaves me with a bad feeling – but luckily there is a tool that makes this job at least a bit easier for a developer .. jsoup to the rescue!

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Using the contract-first approach to define a web service offers some advantages in contrast to the code-first approach.

In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at some details of this approach and we’re going to implement a real SOAP service using JAX-WS, Maven and the Eclipse IDE.

Finally we’re going to run our service implementation on an embedded Jetty instance and we’re going to take a look at soapUI and how to test our service using this neat tool.

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Aspect oriented programming and the definition of cross-cutting-concerns is made easy in Java EE 6 using interceptors.

In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at the different possibilities to apply interceptors to your EJBs at class or method level and how to setup a GlassFish instance to run the examples.

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Portlets are a common technology to create plug&play components for modern web applications and are specified by the Java Community Process in several specification requests.

In the following tutorial we’re going to learn how to create custom portlets and how to deploy and embed them in Liferay, the popular open-source enterprise portal.

In addition we’re taking a look at inter-portlet-communication and how to create portlets using annotations.

Finally we’re building a portlet-state-aware Java-Server-Faces portlet using the  jsf-portlet-bridge mechanism.

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Often ant tasks are used in Maven builds but wouldn’t it be more attractive to integrate the Groovy language into our build process?

GMaven is the answers to this problem and brings together Maven and Groovy. It allows us to execute Groovy scripts inline from our Maven configuration, from a local script or even from a remote location. In the following short examples I am going to show how to configure Maven to execute Groovy scripts from different locations.

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I am currently working on a plugin that needs to receive some information from an LDAP/Active Directory using JNDI. That’s why I needed to set up a directory server in a short time and I didn’t want to waste much effort for here.

Luckily for me the Apache Directory Studio saved my day and allowed me to set up everything I needed in a few minutes.

Short and sweet: In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to configure everything you need in your Eclipse IDE and finally how to query the created LDAP server with a tiny java client using JNDI.

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Message Driven Beans are no new concept due to the fact that they exist since EJB 2.0 but in Java EE 6 and the EJB 3.0 specification it is even more fun to use them.

In this tutorial we’re going to take a look at the specification and create an example application that transfers some objects via the Java Message Service to a Message-Driven Bean deployed on a GlassFish application server.

If you’re not interested in theory please skip to chapter 6 and directly start creating an application – otherwise we’ll begin with a short introduction into the JMS terminology and the concept of a Message-Driven-Bean..

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Behaviour Driven Development is the keyword when we’re talking about test scenarios written in an ubiquitous language, strong interaction with stakeholders, product owners or testers and well described, common understandable test scenarios.

The popular JBehave framework is our tool of choice here and allows us to decouple our test stories from the test classes, offers an integration for web tests using Selenium and finally there’s a helpful Maven plugin for JBehave, too.

After a short excursion into the principles of Behaviour Driven Development we’re going to write and implement test stories for simple acceptance tests and web tests using selenium.

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Last year I passed the exam for the “Oracle Certified Professional Java Programmer”successfully and wanted to share my exam preparation notes about common problems and pitfalls to be aware of.

That’s why I have added some code and examples for my top 25 challenges below.

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Today we’re going to take a look at the Mockito framework that not only does sound like my favourite summer cocktail but also offers nice testing, mocking/stubbing, test-spying features and mock injections.

After that we’re going to take a look on how to mock static or final classes by extending Mockito’s capabilities with PowerMock.

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Java EE 6 is out and it indeed offers an interesting stack of technologies. So in today’s tutorial we are going to build a small sample web application that builds on this stack using Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Persistence API, Bean Validation, CDI and finally Java Server Faces and PrimeFaces.

The application we’re going to develop is a simple blog app that allows us to create new articles, list them and – finally delete them. We’re also covering some additional topics like JSF navigation, i18n, Ajax-enabled components and the deployment on the GlassFish application server.
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Are you playing around with the shiny new 3.1 EJB API?

Using Maven for your Java projects?

Need an easy way to write and execute tests for your EJBs that depends on an Java Application Server?

No problem using Maven Archetypes, the Maven EJB Plugin and the GlassFish embedded Application Container..

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You want to add some validation logic to your Java beans? You want to achieve this with some shiny extendable annotations? Then give the Java Bean Validation standard aka JSR-303 a try..

We’re going to use the reference implementation for bean validation, Hibernate Validator in this tutorial but there are also links to other alternatives like Oval or Apache Bean Validation.

So let’s begin and validate some stuff ..
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Often in a developer’s life there is a REST service to deal with and nowadays one wants a fast and clean solution to create a client for such a service.

The following tutorial shows a quick approach using JAX-RS with its reference implementation, Jersey in combination with JAX-B for annotation driven marshalling between XML or JSON structures and our Java-Beans.

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In this tutorial we’re going to modify an existing Java Server Faces / JSF 2 web application by adding rich UI components to the existing layout.

Our tool of choice here is the PrimeFaces framework. It offers a wide range of interesting, customizable and (several) Ajax-enabled components that blend very well with JSF1+2  and also a solid documentation that allows a quick integration into existing projects.
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Today we’re going to take a look at the world of object-relational Mapping and how it is done using the Java Persistence API by creating some basic examples, mapping some relations and querying objects using JPQL or the Criteria API..

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It is possible to create SOAP webservices with only a few lines of code using the JAX-WS annotations. In a productivity environment you might prefer using contract-first instead of code-first to create your webservice but for now we’re going to use the fast method and that means code-first and annotations olé!

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Having read an interesting comparison by Lindenlabs evaluating modern message broker systems like ActiveMQ, ApacheQpid and amongst others – RabbitMQ – I wanted to take a quick look at the last one and built a small application producing and consuming some sample messages.

If you need some lecture on getting started with RabbitMQ or the key concepts of messaging I strongly recommend reading this list of introductional articles from the RabbitMQ homepage.

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There is still the urban myth that using Spring IoC container without thousands lines of XML code isn’t possible – so today we’re taking a look at annotation based configuration with Spring 3 and of course we’re using Maven..

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In this tutorial we will take a look at the development of a simple OSGi Web Application and what tools can save us some time.

The Maven Bundle Plugin makes our life much easier here as does the OSGi Bundle Repository that offers some nice bundles – in our case the servlet API and an embedded Jetty web server.

So lets develop some bundles ..

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In this short tutorial we are going to build a Java Server Faces Web-Application using JSF2.0, Facelets, Maven and Hibernate as ORM Mapper.

The goals for this first step are: Setting up the project structure using Maven, defining a frame template/decorator and a registration facelet, creating a managed bean and mapping it’s values to the facelet, adding some basic validation, displaying validation errors and finally adding a navigation structure.

In step2 of this tutorial we are going to add persistence using Hibernate, add some security, create a custom UI component and add some AJAX.

The Mojarra JSF implementation is used for this tutorial – perhaps I’m going to post more about the MyFaces implementation in another tutorial.

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Sometimes QR codes are a nice way to distribute information like calendar events, contact information, e-mail, geo-locations or internet addresses.

In the following article we’re going to encode information to QR code images using the ZXing library and afterwards decode information from a given QR code.

Finally we’re taking a look on online QR code generators and how to integrate the ZXing library in a Maven project.

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There is a nice Maven plugin helping you signing your Android app – the Maven Jar Signer Plugin. If you want to learn more about Maven integration in an android project take a look at this article. (more…)

The goal is to build a small macro plugin deployable via the Confluence plugin API rendering some spaces.

Please note that I am going to build the plugin using just Maven and not the Atlassian Maven Wrapper called the “Atlassian Plugin SDK” – more information about that is available at the Atlassian website.

The macro output will be rendered using a Velocity template and all messages are stored for i18n in properties files bundled with the plugin.

If you need to set up an instance of Confluence first, head over to this article. (more…)

Having written the article “How to build a Confluence SOAP client in 5 minutes” some readers asked me for some more information and help using the  JAX-WS plugin that I mentioned in the article instead of the Axis plugin – so here we go ;) (more…)

In a maven project there are lots of dependencies to handle – often one wants to know which version of a software comes from.

The solution to this problem is the Maven Dependency Plugin which helps you to find used/unused/declared/undeclared dependencies in your project.

In addition the plugin allows you to copy or unpack artifacts. (more…)

Building a simple IMAP Client that displays the subject of the messages in the “inbox” Folder using Maven (I just like Maven). (more…)

With the Maven Android Plugin it is possible to build and deploy/undeploy your android app and start/stop the emulator – if you’re used to maven you won’t be going without it ;)

If you’re interested in signing your apk using maven – take a look at this article. (more…)

In this tutorial we are going to build a SOAP client for the popular Confluence Wiki in about five minutes. The client is going to receive rendered HTML Markup from a specified Confluence Page.
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Helo – today I wanted to post a small tutorial for a small index and search operation using the Lucene indexer and Maven for the project setup.

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Short Facts:

• About 850 pages – heavy weight – use it for self defence! ;)
• Preparation material for the Sun Exam 310-065 (Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java SE 6)
• CD-Rom with a nice exam simulator included
• Authors: Kathy Sierry and Bert Bates
• ISBN: 978-0071591065

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We are all waiting for a stable release of Maven3 with following updates ..

• faster, more performant .. save us time building our software and some precious memory ;)
• improved artifact resolution api and plugin api
• better osgi integration
• a few bugfixes
• no mixing of application dependencies and tooling dependencies
• though it does not matter that much to me: polyglot features .. e.g.: “Writing your pom files in Groovy”
• version-less parent elements for multi-module or multi-pom projects, no need to define the parent version in every submodule
• better artifact resolution, which dependency or pom supplied which artifact to the outcome .. got that information from: “Splitter from the world of Java”

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