Twitterfeed #4

Welcome to the fourth issue of my Twitterfeed. I'm still quite irregular on posting the links. But here are some interesting articles that I think are worth sharing.

News, announces and releases

Atlassian aquired Trello. OMG! I mean... happy for Trello founders. I just hope that the product would remain as good as it was.

Docker 1.13 was released. Using compose-files to deploy swarm mode services is really cool! The new monitoring and build improvements are handy. Also Docker is now AWS and Azure-ready, which is awesome!

Kotlin 1.1 beta was published with a number of interesting new features. I have mixed feelings, however. For instance, I really find type aliases an awesome feature, but the definition keyword, "typealias", feels too verbose. Just "alias" would have been much nicer.
Meanwhile, Kotlin support was announced for Spring 5. I think this is great - Kotlin suppot in the major frameworks will definitely help the adoption.

Is there anyone using Eclipse? [trollface] Buildship 2.0 for Eclipse is available, go grab it! :)

Resonating articles

RethinkDB: Why we failed. Probably the best post-mortem that I have ever read. You will notice a strange kvetch at first about the tough market and how noone wants to pay. But then reading forward the author honestly lists what was really wrong. Sad that it didn't take off, it was a great project.

The Dark Path - probably the most contradicting blog post I've read recently. Robert Martin takes his word on Swift and Kotlin. A lot of people, the proponents of strong typing, reacted to this blog post immediately. "Types are tests!", they said. However, I felt like Uncle Bob just wrote this articles to repeat his point about tests: "it doesn't matter if your programming language strongly typed or not, you should write tests". No one would disagree with this statement, I believe. However, the followup article was just strange: "I consider the static typing of Swift and Kotlin to have swung too far in the statically type-checked direction." OMG, really!? Did Robert see Scala or Haskell? Or Idris? IMO, Swift and Kotlin hit the sweet spot in regards to type system that would actually _help_ the developers without getting in the way. Quite a disappointing read, I have to say..

Java 9

JDK 9 is feature complete. Those are great news. Now, it would be nice to see how will the ecosystem survive with all the issues related to reflective access. Workarounds exist, but there should be a proper solution without such hacks. Jigsaw caused a lot of concerns here and there but the bet is that in the long run, the benefits will outweigh the inconveniences.

Misc

The JVM is not that heavy
15 tricks for every web dev
Synchronized decorators
Code review as a gateway
How to build a minimal JVM container with Docker and Alpine Linux
Lagom, the monolith killer
Reactive Streams and the weird case of backpressure
Closures don’t mean mutability.
How do I keep my git fork up to date?

Predictions for 2017

Since it is the beginning of 2017, it is trendy to make predictions for the trends of the upcoming year. Here are some prediction by the industry thought leaders:

Adam Bien’s 2017 predictions
Simon Ritter’s 2017 predictions
Ted Neward’s 2017 predictions

Twitterfeed #3

Welcome to the third issue of my Twitterfeed. Over two weeks since the last post I've accumulated a good share of links to the news and blog posts, so it is a good time "flush the buffer".


Let's start with something more fundamental than just the news about frameworks and programming languages. "A tale of four memory caches" is a nice explanation of how browser caching works. Awesome read, nice visuals, useful takeaways. Go read it!

Machine Learning seems is becoming more and more popular. So here's a nicely structured knowledge-base at your convenience: "Top-down learning path: Machine Learning for Software Engineers".

Next, let's see what's new about all the reactive buzz. The trend is highly popular so I've collected a few links to the blog posts about RxJava and related.

First, "RxJava for easy concurrency and backpressure" is my own writeup about the beauty of the RxJava for a complex problem like backpressure combined with concurrent task scheduling.

Dávid Karnok published benchmark results for the different reactive libraries.

"Refactoring to Reactive - Anatomy of a JDBC migration" explains how reactive approach can be introduced incrementally into the legacy applications.

The reactive approach is also suitable for the Internet of Things area. So here's the article about Vert.x being used for IoT world.

IoT is actually not only about the devices but also about the cloud. Arun Gupta published a nice write up about using the AWS IoT Button with AWS Lambda and Couchbase. Looks pretty cool!

Now onto the news related to my favourite programming tool, IntelliJ IDEA!

IntelliJ IDEA 2017.1 EAP has started! Nice, but I'm not amused. Who needs those emojis anyway?! I hope IDEA developers will find something more useful in the bug tracker to fix and improve.

Andrey Cheptsov experiments with code folding in IntelliJ IDEA. The Advanced Expressions Folding plugin is available for download - give it a try!

Claus Ibsen announced that the work has started on Apache Camel IntelliJ plugin.

Since we are at the news about IntelliJ IDEA, I think it makes sense to see what's up with Kotlin as well. Kotlin 1.0.6 has been released, which is the new bugfix and tooling update. Seems like Kotlin is getting more popularity and people try to use it in conjunction with popular frameworks like Spring Boot and Vaadin.

Looks like too many links already so I'll stop here. I should start posting those more often :)

Twitterfeed #2

So this is the second issue of my Twitterfeed, the news that I noticed in Twitter. Much more sophisticated compared to the first post, but still no structure and no definite periodicity.

Articles:

Java Annotated Monthly - December 2016. Nice collection of articles about Java 9, Java 8, libraries and frameworks, etc. With this, my Twitterfeed is now officially meta! 😃

RebelLabs published Java Generics cheat sheet. Print it out and put at the wall in your office!

Server side rendering with Spring and React. Interesting approach to UI rendering with React. Some parts of the UI are rendered at the server side, and some data is then rendered at the client side.

One year as a Developer Advocate. Vlad Mihalcea reflects on his achievements from the first year in the role of a Developer Advocate for Hibernate. Well done!

IDEA 2016.2 Icon Pack. IDEA 2016.3 update came with the new icons and some people don’t really like those. There is now a plugin to replace the new icons with the old icons. Enjoy!

Oh, and talking about IntelliJ IDEA, there is another great blog post related to 2016.3 release. Alasdair Nottingham writes about Liberty loos applications support in IDEA: Faster application development with IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3

Reactive programming vs Reactive systems. Jonas Boner and Viktor Klang make it clear, what is the difference between the two. "Messages have a clear (single) destination, while events are facts for others to observe".

Good Programmers Write Bug-Free Code, Don’t They? Yegor Bugayenko has a good point about the relation of good programming to a bug-free code.

Cyclops Java by Example: N-Queens. A coding kata for N-Queens problem using "cyclop's for-comprehensions".

Zero downtime deployment with the database. The name says it all.

RxJava 2.0 interview with David Karnok about the major release. Here comes support for Reactive Streams specification!

Reactor by Example. Reactor is very similar to RxJava, but it is also in the core of Spring Framework’s 5.0 reactive programming model.

An explanation of the different types of performance testing. I think this is quite important to make the difference.

Videos:

Spec-ulation by Rich Hickey. As usual, must watch!

Microservices evolution: how to break your monolithic database. Microservices are becoming mainstream, it seems. So we need best practices for building microservices based systems.

Twitterfeed #1

Twitterfeed is the collection of news that I find via Twitter. I have no particular system or a method on how do I pick the news. Neither do I have a predefined period for grouping the news. It is neither daily or weekly or monthly - it is all just random. Enjoy! :)


Java 10 is now officially a project
IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3, my favourite IDE, was released!!! Yay!
CLion 2016.3, a IDE for C/C++ development was released
Rider, a new IDE for .NET is now publicly available via EAP
Akka 2.4.14 was released
Ceylon 1.3.1 was released
Fedora 25 was released

Heinz Kabutz teaches how to implement our own ArrayList in less than 10 minutes
Martin Kleppmann talks about conflict resolution for eventual consistency
Yegor Bugayenko rants about software architects
Roland Kuhn writes about understanding distribution

IDE Project Files In Version Control - Yes or No? Of Course, Not!

NB! This topic is mostly related to Java projects. The situation might be a little different in case of other technologies and IDEs.

Just recently I had some discussions with the clients who were claiming that they keep IDE project files in version control system hence they avoid any changes to those files. For reference, those are Eclipse generated .project and .classpath. From my point of view it is a bad practice by all means, however I usually prefer to collect some information on the topic before I say it loudly. So I asked from my G+ and Twitter followers, IDE project files in version control - Yes/No? Surprisingly, I've got quite a number of responses, so I decided to summarize the information as a blog post.

Basically, the answer to this question isn't binary, yes or no, but it also could be "yes, but... " or "no, if...". So there might be some argument why someone prefers one way or another.

The vast majority of the answers is "No, no, noooooooo!! Never!". And just a couple of answers were "yes" with some weak arguments of why someone should keep those files in version control.

Here are some yes answers first.

Bad stuff. Seems that the team isn't really competent with the tools. The project should be easy to setup and why on earth I should press 100500 buttons to setup a project. If this is the case, the first thing that team lead should do, is to simplify the project structure, setup and build process. No excuses there.

Yeah, yeah, I can already hear some arguments like "but we have a complex project" or "this is the way our setup is done". Bullsh*t!

OK, there is some optimization for the setup, IDE specific though. If all the team members use the same setup, it might even make sense for those who want to keep hands off the console.

Here's another one:

"Specific Eclipse plugins" - yeah! that's is actually an argument for not keeping the files in version control! Eclipse plugins usually modify .project files as they add a "nature" or any other project specific settings to the configuration. And actually, IntelliJ does the same, but (let me bash to tools a bit) IntelliJ can suggest the settings as you open a project from scratch. And with Eclipse, you have to do that manually. What if your colleague uses some awesome eclipse plugin that makes modifications to .project file, and you hate that plugin and do not want to install it, and the .project file is in version control? Here's just a simple example that you could see while exporting a project with existing project files:

This is so annoying to resolve this kind of problems. And all you want to do is just to open the project and proceed with your normal work.

Here's more:

Currently, I use IntelliJ and the rest of the team uses Eclipse. And I absolutely do not care if they put the project files into version control, because I will import it into my IDE in two clicks anyway. So the assumption that "absolutely yes, given that the team is working with the same IDEs" is wrong, and no viable argument here as well. 

However, here we have some much more interesting ideas:

Wow, this is really interesting one - "those that define formatting or source code". Indeed! In cases when you work on varions projects for different clients, the requirements and code styles might be quite different and it makes sense even to keep this kind of files in version control, so you can share it with the team and restore the code style settings if you lost them. Good point here!

However, you can probably see the vector of my post now.

So the point is, IDEs support Maven quite well, so why on earth I would need to keep the IDE settings in version control if we already have what we need: pom.xml. IntelliJ and NetBeans cope with that quite well, and Eclipse also, if you use JBoss Tools.

But what if I'm a Maven hater? (I really am). Here's an interesting conversation:

Oh sure, Gradle that is! Well, the IDE support isn't there yet. Luckily, STS provides a nice Gradle plugin for Eclipse, but the support for IntelliJ and NetBeans isn't quite there yet.

However, my claim is that Maven or Gradle isn't the prerequisite to avoid the project files in version control. The real prerequisite is the simple setup of you project and a clean structure, so that importing the project is just a couple of clicks. Then you can cope with any kind of project, even if it doesn't contain pom.xml.

And here's what most of them say about the topic:

Myself, I have tried both ways - keeping the project files in version control and not checking them in, and my take is that under no circumstances it is a good idea to check the project files in. Again, a much better solution is to keep your project structure clean and simple, which might be harder than to check the files into version control, but much more beneficial on the long run.

Thanks everyone for the input! Take care...