How To Testing

Test System.out with JUnit

May 12, 2017 – 3:54 pm

It can be useful to verify output to System.out in a unit test. For example, if you’re testing application logging or if you’re using log output to sense some other behaviour. It can be tricky to properly mock behaviour of System.out but fortunately, it is possible to test System.out using JUnit.

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How To Spring Boot

Spring Boot Actuator Trace: Logging HTTP requests

April 14, 2017 – 1:28 pm

Spring Boot Actuator provides assistance for application monitoring. Out of the box it provides information on application health, configuration and logging. It’s trivial to enable: simply add the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency to a Spring Boot project in Maven or Gradle and it just works! The monitoring information is provided as JSON from HTTP endpoints or via JMX.

The Spring Boot Actuator trace endpoint is particularly handy. By default it shows the last 100 HTTP requests made to the application. This article walks through an Actuator demo and shows some of the configuration options to get the best from this feature.

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Docker How To

Tomcat debugging in Docker

March 12, 2017 – 7:42 pm

Like a many things in Tomcat, there are a number of ways to enable remote debugging. Here’s the easiest way I’ve found to enable remote debugging in a Docker container running Tomcat.

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Docker How To

Activate the Docker Maven plugin when Docker is present

February 28, 2017 – 10:33 pm

The wonderful docker-maven-plugin from Spotify is a great way to build Docker images from Maven. If you bind it to Maven phases, it can be used to make a one-step build of a project artifact and its Docker image. For example, if you bind the Docker Maven plugin’s build goal to the Maven package phase, read more »

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How To Spring Boot

Spring Boot as a Windows Service

January 1, 2017 – 9:00 pm

The documentation provided by Spring on deploying a Spring Boot application as a Windows Service is a little sparse. Indeed, here it is in full:

Spring Boot application can be started as Windows service using winsw.

A sample maintained separately to the core of Spring Boot describes step-by-step how you can create a Windows service for your Spring Boot application.

— From Spring Boot Reference Guide (version 1.4.3), section 56.2: Microsoft Windows Services

As the official reference guide is lacking detail, here is a step by step guide to building and deploying a Spring Boot application as a Windows Service.

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Spring Boot

Microservice discovery with Spring Boot and Eureka

September 12, 2016 – 11:43 pm

One of the standard problems with Microservices Architecture is the issue of service discovery. Once we’ve decomposed our application into more than a handful of distinct microservices, it becomes difficult for every service to know the address of every service it depends on. Configuring dependencies from inside a microservice is impractical – it distributes configuration among all the microservices. It also violates the DRY principle – multiple microservice instances will need access to the same configuration settings. What’s more, it goes against the Dependency Injection design that’s supposed to be one of the benefits of the Microservices Architecture.

The standard solution is to delegate location of microservices to a new microservice. In keeping with the Single Responsibility Principle, this ‘discovery’ microservice is responsible for tracking the locations of all the other microservices and nothing else.

Netflix’s Eureka is an implementation of a discovery server and integration is provided by Spring Boot. Using Spring Boot, we can build a Eureka discovery server and have our microservices register with it.

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Java Technologies Spring Boot Testing

RestTemplateBuilder and @RestClientTest in Spring Boot 1.4.0

July 16, 2016 – 10:16 pm

Spring Boot 1.4.0 is now available. Among the enhancements are new mechanisms to build and test RestTemplates used to make calls to RESTful web services.

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Docker How To

Building, tagging and pushing Docker images with Maven

July 8, 2016 – 10:21 pm

A standard use case for Docker is to build a container to run a pre-built application so that the containerized app can be run on any Docker enabled host. The application and the container are sometimes developed and built separately. First the application is built, then a container is defined and built to include the application. However, it can be better to promote the Docker container to a first-class build artifact. That is, the build process always builds the deployed component and its container at the same time. This saves a manual build step and also ensures that the Docker container is always up to date with the latest application build. It allows us to easily develop and test against the Dockerized application directly – every build results in a new deployable container.

There are a number of ways to do this. This article looks at hooking the Docker tasks into the Maven build process.

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How To Java Technologies Spring Boot Web Technologies

No code REST services with Spring Boot and Spring Data REST

June 12, 2016 – 10:41 pm

CRUD REST services are the backbone of a microservice architecture. If we want to use microservices rather than monolithic applications, it’s essential that we can create a basic service with a minimum of effort. Spring Boot can be used to quickly create and deploy a new web service. Spring Data REST can be used to build out the REST interface based on a database entity model. Using both together allows us to create a running RESTful web service with zero custom Java code and no tricky XML.

This how-to describes how to build a RESTful web service as an executable JAR that provides CRUD operations against a single MySQL database table.

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Docker How To Java Technologies Web Technologies

WebSocket push notifications with Node.js

April 17, 2016 – 11:31 pm

The Node.js website describes it as having “an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient”. Sounds lovely, but what’s it actually for?

Modulus’s excellent blog post – An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Node.js provides some rather tasty examples. After covering the trivial examples (Hello world! and simple file I/O), it gets to the meat of what we’re about – an HTTP server. The simple example demonstrates a trivial HTTP server in Node.js in 5 lines of code. Not 5 lines of code compiled to an executable or deployed into an existing web server. 5 lines of code that can be run from a simple command. It then goes on to describe the frameworks and libraries that let you do really useful stuff.

This looks just the thing for implementing a new feature in the Spanners demo app: push notifications to all logged-in users when a spanner is changed.

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