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Author: Sebastian Basner

JavaLand 2018

JavaLand 2018

JavaLand Logo Disclaimer: I may be a bit biased on the topic as I really like the conference from the beginning and attended in this years session review process.
The 2018 edition of the still very young, community driven, Java conference JavaLand took place in the theme park “Phantasialand” in Brühl next to Cologne from March 13th-15th. The conference was splitted into two conference days (13th and 14th) and one workshop day. It was just the fifth edition of JavaLand and I was able to attend the conference days.
What makes JavaLand pretty special and very unique is the venue. It is not only located in a theme park but as it is early in the year the season for the park has not yet begun and the park is opened for JavaLand attendees only. To be honest they just open up a part of the park but it is still pretty cool. As part of the social event on the first conference day there are some park rides opened for the attendees which shifts the spirit of the attendees pretty fast away from the technical part and makes it really easy to come together with new people even if you are not the type to make new contacts fast.
The conference itself mostly consists of 40 minute talks mixed up with some panels and just a couple of hands on workshops per day.

Sessions:
A huge part of the sessions is in german which should be no surprise as it is a german conference which tries to get new speakers from the community involved and as common as it is that most of us speak and understand english these days it is not the mother tongue and there still are many people who don’t speak english frequently which leads to not being comfortable and practiced enough to hold a talk in english. Nevertheless the program committee has an eye on having some english talks at any time so that non german speaking visitors can attend a session at any time.
This year I could hardly make out any new hype topic in the talks. The topics were nicely spread so there should be something interesting for everyone most of the time.
I for myself attended a lot of core Java topics and listened to some panels about the future of JavaEE/JakartaEE as well as the distribution of the JDK and the changes in the support for desktop technologies.
Besides that I got a nice introduction to gRPC which I only knew by name so far and am now in a better position to sort the application possibilities out.

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Snapshotting PostgreSQL databases with templates using Spring JDBC

Snapshotting PostgreSQL databases with templates using Spring JDBC

postgresql logo Nowadays with the rise of more and more complex systems software testing is more important then ever. This not only includes unit testing but also integration-, end to end- and acceptance tests. For some of these test scenarios it is important to have a defined state of your database which could be reproduced in example between different test suites. To achieve this goal there are different options. It is possible to simply rebuild a docker container in which the database runs and migrate to the actual state with a tool like flyway (here I described how to do that with a Java EE application) but this may take some time and seems only suitable between independent test runs. Another option would be to delete all table data (truncate) and repopulate all the needed test data with appropriate SQL Scripts. This should be the fastest option but it has the disadvantage that the SQL scripts has to be maintained manually and you could only reset a state that is kept in this SQL scripts.
When I was faced with this task I recently used a nice feature of the PostgreSQL database for a snapshot like behaviour. Postgres comes with a build-in template mechanism which is used when a new database is created. For this a freshly installed Postgres instance comes with a default database named ‘postgres’ and two templates named ‘template0’ and ‘template1’. The idea is that you can modify template1 as you like to suite your needs for creating new empty databases and let template0 as it is to still have a plain default. You can read more about this in the Postgres documentation. Additional to that it is possible to create your own custom templates which can be copies of actual databases. By doing that you can effectively “roll back” at any time later. In my case this was really fast (your mileage may vary depending on the size of your database), had a minimum of code to be written and comes with the benefit that it is possible to make the template at runtime when the tester has created a state he would like to reproduce.

I chose to do all the needed operations with Spring JDBC as it is very convenient because the use of the JdbcTemplate handles all the connecting/disconnecting and error handling for you. All you need to do is to pass it a datasource and use standard SQL statements as query parameters for the template. To learn more about it you can take a look at the excellent Spring documentation about data access with JDBC but I guess you will be able to follow my code snippets here as well.

@Component
public class DefaultDataSource extends DriverManagerDataSource {

  @PostConstruct
  public void init() {
    this.setDriverClassName("org.postgresql.Driver");
    this.setUrl("jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/postgres");
    this.setUsername("user");
    this.setPassword("password");
  }
}

This class defines a datasource for a standard Postgres db running on your local machine at the standard port. The @Component annotation is used by Spring  to identify it as a Spring bean which makes it injectable via the @Autowired annotation while the @PostConstruct annotation gets the init method called after construction of the object.

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Path environment variable at IntelliJ on macOS

Path environment variable at IntelliJ on macOS

intellij-ideaLately I encountered a problem with IntelliJ on macOS I wasn’t aware of so far. For a new project I joined it was necessary to let Java execute a shell script which resides in /usr/local/bin and calls another script. Putting all the questions for the reason behind this aside I was pretty puzzled when I couldn’t get this to work while on all my colleagues Linux machines it worked like a charm.
After fiddling around with it for a while it became very much clear that the JVM which I started from IntelliJ didn’t had /usr/local/bin in its PATH environment variable and because of that couldn’t execute the script. The question was why this was the case. When I started the application via gradle on the shell everything worked correct which seemed to point to an IntelliJ problem. After some research it became clear that the root cause of the problem is a concept in macOS which separates the shell environment variables from the environment variables for GUI processes, or better said the environment variables for processes which are started from Spotlight, Finder or the desktop.
The standard environment variables set for GUI applications on macOS are controlled via launchctl and are per default set to /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin.

The quick solution to get around this and use the environment variables set in the Shell via .bashrc or .zshrc etc. is to start IntelliJ (or any other UI application) via the command line. This can be done on with the command

open /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA.app

After that IntelliJ runs in the shell context and has access to all the variables set there. If this doesn’t suit you and you want a more permanent solution which makes it possible to start IntelliJ without the shell and still have access to the environment variables there is a solution for that, too.
You have to create the file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist. A plist file in macOS is a property list file which is a widely used concept in macOS (read more about it here). In this file there can be some startup configurations stored. A minimal configuration to just control the environment variables could look like this:

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Automation via shell aliases

Automation via shell aliases

terminal-appWhen working on software development projects there are many repetitive tasks to do, may it be the deployment of a binary, starting of different servers in docker containers or standalone, the exchange of config files for different environments, the migration of a database or something simple as the navigation to deep paths on the command line to do some editings or server starts there. All this tasks can be annoying and over time they add up to a significant amount of time which is not very productive. The logical counter measure for a developer should be to automate as much as possible of this recurring tasks. For example you can bundle up the start of different docker containers via docker compose or delegate some tasks to a CI server but in the end some tasks will remain which you have to trigger manually -at least on your development machine- which is where your shell can become handy with a feature called ‘alias’. An alias is an automation feature which at least every popular Linux/Unix/macOS shell provides. With an alias you can define a new command that executes a series of shell commands completely automatic.
I have a rule of thumb defined where I try to automate every manual task by an alias which I have to do at a minimum of three times a week (to be honest I also do an alias if I have to do a task two times every week just because it is such a handy feature).
To define a new alias all you have to do is to add it to the config file of your shell. In the case of the very popular bash shell this file is called .bashrc (on macOS you have to use the .bash_profile file when you use bash) while for zsh it is called .zshrc but in both cases the file sits in the users home folder. All you have to do is to open your rc file with an text editor, scroll to the end and add a new line starting with the keyword ‘alias’ followed by the alias name you chose and the command that should be executed. A sample command could look like this:

alias cdwildfly="cd ~/programming/java/servers/wildfly/"

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Integrating Flyway with Java EE and using its datasource

Integrating Flyway with Java EE and using its datasource

Flyway is my favourite tool when it comes to database migrations because its convention over configuration approach makes it fairly easy to use while bootstrapping and configuration is reduced to a minimum. For those of you who don’t know anything about database migration tools (evolutionary database design) in short the concept is to track SQL scripts with your source code which reflect the actual version of your database that matches the code version to run properly. This could be done without any framework but what tools like Flyway or liquibase bring to the table is the ability to check automatically at build- or start-time if the database is at the latest available version and if not run all available SQL scripts from the actual database version to the newest one available. Flyway can be used with all the major SQL dialects, many different relational databases and has plugins for a huge variety of frameworks to be integrated into. For more detailed information visit the projects website.

As I’m a heavy Java EE user I ran into the problem that Java EE has no special support by Flyway. My problems with this are that there is no build in way to get the actual JPA datasource (defined in the persistence.xml) and there is no solution provided that wires Flyway in the startup process to run the migration scripts at startup. Flyway provides integration plugins with this functionalities for other frameworks like Spring Boot but fortunately it is not that complicated to realise the same thing in Java EE.

In many scenarios it is no problem to trigger Flyway in the right moment as it is possible to integrate it in the maven build process or start it manually via the command line but both solutions doesn’t fit my needs. I want to have Flyway check my database at startup as the production server is not the server where the build process happens and I want to avoid a situation where I have to execute a shell command manually after deploying a new version. For this cases Flyway can be started from the source code as well. As it has to be run before the application starts and tries using the database you have to make sure that the Flyway scripts are run before that. I found two solutions to make this work. The first one uses Hibernates “Service Provider Interface” (SPI) -I use WildFly in this example which comes with Hibernate- to register a new integrator and grab the datasource via a little bit of reflection code while the second approach (which is my favourited solution) defines a new singleton bean which uses @resource injection to get the datasource.

Hibernate SPI integrator solution

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