At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to start better documenting my reading habits and sharing them here with all of you.
The point is two fold – by curating and documenting, my reading has become more purposeful and diverse. Also – I believe that curation of good content brings a lot of value, helps people explore and allows the best stuff to raise to the top.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy these as we move in the latter half of 2014.
Here we go…
1. Java
>> First batch of JEPs proposed to target JDK 9
Maybe you saw this email by now – it’s the first few JEPs targeted to be part of JDK 9 – with modularity being, of course, the big one.
>> Writing Tests for Data Access Code – Data Matters
Another solid piece in the “Clean Testing” series from Petri. This one is discussing best practices of using DBUnit, in the context of an actual project with sufficient complexity. Don’t worry – once the problems are out of the way, there are solutions to be had.
>> The anatomy of Hibernate dirty checking
The saga continues – a deep dive into Hibernate, this time going over the default mechanism for dirty checking (and the bytecode instrumentation alternative). I can see a book or a course coming out of this track.
>> eclipse-pmd – New PMD plugin for Eclipse
If you ever struggled to get the same static analysis engine (such as PMD) working and using the exact same configuration file in both Eclipse and in your Maven build – this comes as a nice surprise. Cool beans.
>> Understanding JUnit’s Runner architecture
An interesting, in-depth look at how Runners work in JUnit and how you can implement your own. Not necessarily something you do every day, but still very cool.
2. Spring
>> Building a RESTful quotation service with Spring
A practical guide on building a simple REST API for quotations – for one of the Spring guides nonetheless. There are a few guides like this out already, but seeing how this is Spring eating their own dogfood – it’s a cool exercise and a solid resource.
Finally a few interesting Spring releases:
- >> Spring Security 4.0.0.M2 Released
- >> CVE-2014-3527 Fixed in Spring Security 3.2.5 and 3.1.7
- >> First Release Candidate of Spring Data Release Train Evans Available
3. Technical
>> Route 53 Benchmark: The New AWS Geolocation’s Surprising Results
Testing and real-world numbers on Route 53 – Geolocation vs latency based routing.
>> In Defense of Test Setup Methods
Whichever way you lean – creating fixtures before the test or inside – this is a piece that takes the time to sit down and think through the arguments. Be ruthless with code duplication, mosey on over and read this one.
4. Comics
Continuing this recently introduced section in the review – my next favorite XKCDs after the ones from last week. Brilliant? I’d say so: