my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Code Review Checklist and Tool Recommendations

Quite some time ago, both the code quality tool provider Codacy and the software architect Surender Reddy Gutha individually published useful resources on how to do effective code reviews and which tools to use for those: Code Review Checklist – To Perform Effective Code Reviews List of tools for code review engineers While unfortunately the two Pull Panda tools and ReadyforReview from the latter list are no longer available, the remaining tools as well as the checklist from the first article can be still ...

Schematic – A Database Management UI for Spring Boot

Out of my own need for an embedded database management tool for Spring Boot web applications, similar to the H2 Console, but for non-embedded databases, I've created Schematic - a database management UI for Spring Boot. Specifically, for the Workshops.DE Spring Boot course, some time ago we had decided to replace a development-time, embedded H2 database (and the console application that comes with it) with a more realistic (in that it brings our code closer to an assumed dev / prod parity, ...

Sunday March 5th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Stratospheric 1.10 Release 🚀

This week, we published another update to Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. This time it’s a pretty big one, as we’ve migrated the Stratospheric sample Todo application to Spring Boot 3.0 and Spring Cloud 3.0. The release of Spring Boot 3.0 marks a new era of developing applications with the Spring Framework. 4.5 years after the release of Spring Boot 2.0, we’re now looking into a bright future and can make the most of Spring Framework 6, ...

Sunday February 26th, 2023 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Just – A Command Line Toolkit for Spring Boot Applications

In December last year, freelance software consultant Maciej Walkowiak, who also is the lead developer of Spring Cloud AWS, released just, a command-line toolkit for developing Spring Boot applications. I've been using just since then and I'm extremely happy with this tool and how it has improved my development experience with Spring Boot. Although Spring Boot already provides a more than decent developer experience - especially when it comes to getting up and running quickly and integrating technologies and data sources - compared ...

Sunday February 19th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Faster Maven Builds With mvnd – A Maven Daemon

Maven is a popular build tool for Java projects. It allows developers to easily manage dependencies, build and test their code, and package it for distribution. However, one downside of Maven is that it can be slow to start up, especially on large projects. This is where the Maven Daemon, or mvnd, comes in. mvnd is a tool that allows Maven to run in the background as a daemon process, rather than as a one-off command. This means that when you run ...

Sunday February 5th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Stratospheric Online Course Early-Bird Batch #4

This week, we've released another iteration of the Stratospheric online course. With that release, we've closed our early-bird batch #3 and opened the penultimate batch. The new videos at a glance: Part I: Deploying with AWS Deploying a Network Stack with CDK Deploying a Service Stack with CDK Part II: Spring Boot & AWS Sharing Todos with Amazon SQS and Amazon SES You can find further information about the early-bird program on our website. If you want to get a feel for the course check out the sample video ...

Sunday January 29th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Inheriting Properties for Lombok @Builders and JPA Entities

Lombok is one of those helpful developer tools for the Java language ecosystem that streamline (or even do away with entirely) the more tedious and mundane tasks in software development. Lombok in particular vastly reduces the boilerplate code Java developers have to write by providing annotations that have code for common structures and patterns such as constructors, getters and setters, and builders automatically generated. While tremendously helpful, sometimes edge cases can occur when working with theses kinds of abstractions and as a ...

Sunday January 22nd, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

How to publish a Java library to Maven Central – A Complete Guide By Maciej Walkowiak

Freelance software consultant Maciej Walkowiak (of Just and Spring Cloud AWS fame) has recently published this highly useful guide on "How to publish a Java library to Maven Central". While Maven and its main repository Maven Central certainly is a reliable, safe tool with the requisite infrastructure for managing dependencies for Java software projects, it isn't quite as easy to publish new Maven dependencies as it is for example to publish new npm packages. There's a trade-off here of course (as usually is ...

Sunday January 15th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

spring-dotenv: Using .env Files With Spring Applications

spring-dotenv, which in turn is based on dotenv-java is a library that enables Spring applications to access and use environment variables from .env files. .env files are a convention that enables us to store environment variables locally per directory / project instead of either doing so system-wide or in an ad-hoc manner (e.g., using the export shell command), thus allowing use to more strictly follow the storing config in the environment principle from The Twelve-Factor App in Spring (Boot) applications.

Sunday January 8th, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Bootify: Rapid Prototyping for Spring Boot

Bootify is a rapid prototyping and code generation tool for Spring Boot that aims at improving developer experience for when getting started with a new Spring Boot application. While of course there is Spring Initializr, which serves a similar purpose, Bootify not just generates a minimal Spring Boot application with the desired dependencies but, on top of that and amongst other features, also adds database schema and model generation, REST API and CRUD capabilities, and front-end code generation. With those features, Bootify is ...

Sunday January 1st, 2023 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.