At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung.
2014 has been quite the year, covering each week with a review. I've been doing a lot more reading to make sure I cover and curate stuff that has value and is actually worth reading.
Let me know in the comments if you're finding my reviews interesting and useful.
Here we go…
1. Spring and Java
>> How Spring achieves compatibility with Java 6, 7 and 8
Insight into intelligently building Spring with Java 8 support but not actually requiring Java 8.
There are takeaways here for anyone who's maintaining a library/framework/API in Java land.
>> Spring From the Trenches: Injecting Property Values Into Configuration Beans
If you're dealing with a lot of properties in your project, this is definitely solid advice to follow – makes managing all of that complexity a lot easier.
>> Result Set Mapping: The Basics
The first of what looks to be a promising series about working with the JPA and Result Sets.
>> How does Hibernate store second-level cache entries
Exploring the Hibernate Cache fun and speed. Lot of things to learn from this piece.
>> Spring Enable* annotation – writing a custom Enable annotation
An @EnableFoo style annotation can definitely come in handy in complex systems and there's no reason to be restricted at just the default ones in the framework.
>> Log Management Tools Face-Off: Splunk vs. Logstash vs. Sumo Logic
Log Management, visibility, exploration and analysis are oh-so important even for medium-sized projects. There's just so much you can get out of having a proper log solution implemented in production.
These tools also pretty much pay for themselves the first few times you save a good few hours of grepping through your text based log files. The one I regularly use these days is the ELK stack.
Also worth reading:
>> Writing Clean Tests – Small Is Beautiful
>> How to Avoid the Dreaded Dead Lock when Pessimistic Locking – And some Awesome Java 8 Usage!
>> Java 8 Concurrency Tutorial: Threads and Executors
>> 7 Things You Thought You Knew About Garbage Collection – and Are Totally Wrong
Webinars and presentations:
Time to upgrade:
>> Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.1.2 Released
>> Spring Social Facebook 2.0.0.RC1 Released
>> Spring AMQP 1.4.4 and Spring Integration 3.0.7, 4.0.7 and 4.1.3 are available
>> JClouds 1.9.0
>> Hibernate ORM 5.0.0.Beta1 Release
>> Apache Commons Lang 3.4 Released
2. Technical
>> What Story Does Your Code Tell?
There's always one more step on the path to writing clean, maintainable code.
How that code reads for someone who's not you definitely worth being aware of since so much of the teams time is spent reading code.
Also worth reading:
>> What Good Is Subclass to Test, Anyway?
>> Biological computer simulation of selfish genes
>> Amazon Machine Learning – Make Data-Driven Decisions at Scale
>> Amazon Elastic File System – Shared File Storage for Amazon EC2
3. Musings
>> Given Enough Money, All Bugs Are Shallow
This is an important lesson for all open source projects and for our industry in general. It's very pragmatic and it's definitely a long read, but it has a good chance of nudging the ecosystem along in the right direction.
>> Please Direct all Inquiries to My Agent
An interesting idea – no clue if it's practical or not, but it was fun to read.
Also worth reading:
4. Comics
And my favorite Dilberts of the week:
>> Practical Joke
>> Pick Another Defense
>> Instead of a Raise
5. Pick of the Week
Earlier this year I introduced the “Pick of the Week” section here in my “Weekly Review”. If you're already on my email list – you got the pick already – hope you enjoyed it.