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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.

Beyond Built-in: Advanced Testing Techniques for Spring Boot Applications by Michael Vitz @ Spring I/O 2024

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Unit Test Your Spring Architecture With ArchUnit by Roland Weisleder @ Spring I/O 2024

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Automated Software Refactoring With OpenRewrite and Generative AI by Tim te Beek @ Spring I/O 2024

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Upgrading to Spring Boot 3 Using Spring Boot Migrator

Even though the upgrade process for Spring Boot 3 is pretty straightforward - in case you need to migrate a more than moderately complex project (or several thereof), upgrading Spring Boot applications indeed can become quite tedious and error-prone, too. To alleviate this potential problem, and in order to automate the Spring Boot upgrade process, there's Spring Boot Migrator. Based on the terrific OpenRewrite toolkit for automated large-scale refactoring efforts, Spring Boot Migrator provides you with recipes for migrating both Spring Boot 2.7.x ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Performing Effective Code Reviews – A Checklist

A few years ago, software architect Surender Reddy Gutha compiled a - still quite relevant - Code Review Checklist. All too often, when performing code reviews, we as software engineers tend to focus on minute details such as code formatting rather than the big picture, non-functional requirements, or architecture and security considerations. Perhaps, the problem already originates with the term code review: Rather than reviewing code we are - or should be - reviewing the resulting software and the impact code changes ... Read more

endoflife.date – Dataset with End-of-life Dates for Products

Recently, I came across endoflife.date, which is a quite useful database of product end-of-life dates. While it also includes hardware products (e.g., various iPhone models), its current main focus is software products, in particular those used in (enterprise) software development, such as Java, Spring, or Angular, or infrastructure and runtime environments like Docker or the Apache HTTP Server. A comprehensive, searchable collection of lifetimes for library and framework versions can come in handy when assessing - and potentially improving - the future ... Read more

Clearing the Spring Security Context During Unit Testing

Last week I wrote about a minimal Spring Security Context setup for unit testing. I'd like to add just a tiny, yet depending on your use case perhaps quite important, tidbit to that: In case you need to reset a SecurityContext setup, e.g., a mocked user authentication, because, for instance, other test methods from the same unit test class verify behaviour for an unauthenticated application state and hence expect an anonymous user, you can clear the SecurityContext (for example, in your ... Read more

Minimal Spring Security Context Setup for Unit Testing

Creating a minimal Spring Security setup for JUnit unit tests can be a tedious as well as somewhat daunting task. With its Authentication, Principal, GrantedAuthority, and UserDetails classes Spring Security is extremely flexible and configurable and probably accommodates pretty much every authentication and authorization use case under the sun. However, in software architecture such flexibility often comes at price, the trade-off in this case being that simple use cases can require more implementation effort than one would expect. One such use case ... Read more

In Favour of Keeping Changelogs

Closely related to the art of the README, keeping a changelog can be tremendously helpful when reviewing or contributing to an existing software project or when trying to decide whether to use a new tool. keep a changelog by software developer Olivier Lacan is a website that reminds us of the benefits a "curated, chronologically ordered list of notable changes for each version of a project" provides. Moreover, the website also lists useful guidelines and principles for creating changelogs as well as anti-patterns ... Read more
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