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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.

Tiny, but Useful Spring Boot-related Tool: YAML to Properties Converter

Amongst other options, Spring Boot allows application developers to work with both "traditional" Java-style flat application.properties and hierarchical application.yml (or application.yaml, for that matter) YAML configuration files for providing applications with externalised configuration. Occasionally, for example when migrating from flat properties files to YAML ones (in order to avoid repetition of property keys), the need might arise to convert one of of those formats to the other. To help with that and to avoid tedious - and error-prone - manual work, there's Yaml ... Read more

Action Jackson! Effective JSON processing in Spring Boot Applications by Joris Kuipers @ Spring I/O 2023

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JSON Visualization With JSON Crack

JSON Crack is a JSON visualization solution that allows to generated ad-hoc graph visualizations for your JSON data. While one of the huge advantages of JSON over other data formats certainly is that it's human-readable, more complex JSON documents containing linked data structures can become unwieldy and difficult to understand - at a cursory glimpse, at least. Such situations is where a tool like JSON Crack for visualizing data can come handy. Read more

More on JSON and REST API Specifications

Expanding on my previous posts about annotating and validating JSON data structure with JSON Schema defining and documenting REST APIs using Swagger I have two additional suggestions for tools that help you define and build HTTP-based APIs in a less haphazard, more deliberate manner: JSON API: While JSON Schema allows you to annotate and validate JSON-based data types JSON API gives you clear, opinionated guidelines for structuring JSON API responses so you don't have think about those implementation details yourself. Having uniform guidelines for API ... Read more

Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ... Read more

Annotate and validate data structures with JSON Schema

I'd like to begin my little series of useful tools for developing CRUD applications with JSON Schema: "JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents." JSON Schema gives you a straightforward way to provide type information and validation to existing data structures. Say, for example you have a product instance like this (converted from your language's native object or general data structure format using a tool like Jackson for Java): [code lang="js"] { "id": 1,  ... Read more