Posts
Spring Boot Starters
Code-Review Best Practices
Code review is a crucial practice in software development. One can design and write great software, but we are humans after all. And all humans make mistakes, so another pair of eyes is always helpful.
The review process might seem straightforward, but there are useful tips to make it less painful is some cases.
Running Testcontainers On Dynamic Ports
Running integration tests locally with Docker can be challenging when fixed ports are unavailable due to conflicts. This issue is compounded in shared CI environments where multiple workers are in use. However, using testcontainers can help overcome these obstacles by enabling the startup of Docker containers that listen on random ports.
Kotlin Playground Shortcode for Hugo
Spring Boot Configuration Best Practices
What happens when you split systems into many microservices
Moving from monolithic applications into microservices is current trend in software design. Let’s identify some pros and cons of both architectures and challenges one may face during the system transformation.
Building Data Pipeline with Kotlin Coroutines Actors
In this post I will show how to build simple data-enriching pipeline using Kotlin coroutines. I will use Channels and Actors abstractions provided by kotlinx-coroutines.
In Actors model “actors” are the universal primitives of concurrent computation. In response to a message that it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received. Actors may modify their own private state, but can only affect each other through messages (avoiding the need for any locks).
Let’s start with high-level definition of the pipeline:
(👤Producer) -✉️→ 📬(👤Enricher) -✉️→ 📬(👤Updater)
RawData RichData
- Pipeline will have Producer Actor, which will get some raw data from database or some mock data and will send it to pipeline for enrichment.
- Then Enricher Actor will handle raw data object and add some attributes to it.
- Finally, Updater Actor will store enriched data to the database.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s implement squaring function: we will take integers as raw data and will enrich them by squaring.
Let’s define our data model:
data class RawData(val value: Int)
Enriched data will be represented by data class RichData
:
data class RichData(val value: Int, val square: Int)
Following Actors model, we will use Kotlin Actors to represent processing units in a pipeline and Channels to communicate with Actors.
In Kotlin actors are implemented as part of kotlinx-coroutines library:
An actor is an entity made up of a combination of a coroutine, the state that is confined and encapsulated into this coroutine, and a channel to communicate with other coroutines. A simple actor can be written as a function, but an actor with a complex state is better suited for a class.
Applying Courage in Software Development
Job is not a place for feats. But sometimes you have to be brave to overcome and complete that others considered impossible.
How Does New Oracle JVM Licensing Encourage Agility
What happened? #
Oracle has changed release and licensing policy for JDK:
- The JDK still remains completely free for use. The thing that is changing is the availability of updates to specific versions of the JDK.
- The only free for use in production JDK binary available from Oracle (as of JDK 11) will be the OpenJDK binaries. These will only have public security patch and bug fix updates for six months, until the release of the next version.
- There is no free LTS release of the JDK from Oracle (for use in production).
- Users can continue to use any binary of the JDK (the Oracle version or OpenJDK one) indefinitely. They will not, however, continue to get updates to these JDKs once public updates end.
- Commercial users who want to continue to get security patches and bug fixes for JDK 8 or subsequent LTS releases after public updates have ended will have three options:
- Purchase a commercial support contract from Oracle.
- Use a different binary distribution of the OpenJDK, which has security patches and bug fixes backported to it.
- Create their own binary distribution from the OpenJDK source code and backport updates themselves.
How does it encourage agility? #
- Most of the companies are not willing to purchase commercial support from Oracle.
- At the same time, they need to get latest security updates.
So, what companies have to do –- is to upgrade JDK on production environments more frequently: at least every 6 months.