Articles Tagged ‘failsafe’

Testing OpenAPI / Swagger Schema Compliance with Java, JUnit and assertj-swagger

Friday, August 31st, 2018

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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Testing Java Applications for Resilience by Simulating Network Problems with Toxiproxy, JUnit and the Docker Maven Plugin

Sunday, July 29th, 2018

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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Resilient Architecture in Practice – Circuit Breakers for Java: Failsafe, Javaslang, Hystrix and Vert.x

Tuesday, February 14th, 2017

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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