Cucumber Testing in Spring Batch

Dallas Monson Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Spring, Spring Batch, Testing 3 Comments

With the evolution of microservices and the scalable nature of modern distributed architectures, batch processing seems to be falling out of favor. In fact, the term batch processing itself seems to be unfavorably associated with monolithic mainframe applications and thus does not seem to have much appeal.

Unless, of course, you are working on a project that is being designed to replace or modernize one of those mainframe applications. If that is the case, then likely some sort of batch process has come up with a non-functional requirement that needs to be dealt with in the new system.

For this specific concern, a very powerful framework has been provided: Spring Batch. It has many of the same features of a mainframe batch process like restart/recovery, chunk processing, and error handling along with exit codes. This framework allows developers to create powerful batch processing applications in the Spring Framework and enjoy the rich backplane of capabilities that this provides.

Continuing with the modernization thread, you will likely be tasked with providing some assurances to the business that the new, modernized process will produce the same outcome as the one that is being replaced. Here is where testing comes in, and where Cucumber specifically shines.

Cucumber provides behavioral testing support in the Spring universe. This allows developers and business users to collaborate through a common set of conventions and verbiage to validate that the app is behaving how the business intended as well as how the developer coded it.

In this post we will cover the following:
Why use Cucumber with Spring Batch
An overview of Cucumber and an example Cucumber Test
How to start with Cucumber and Spring Batch…

Keyhole Releases Open Source, React-Based Chat UI Component

Keyhole Software Articles, Company News, Conversational Apps, Keyhole Creations, React Leave a Comment

The Keyhole team is excited to announce the release of an open source UI chat component that can be embedded in applications. This UI Component is React-based and can be used for chatbot and chat-based user interfaces.

This component is stand alone. It has a configurable implementation to talk with any server-side API. This component abstracts away its data transport middleware and, in the absence of a consumer-provided implementation, emulates its own asynchronous reply….

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Pseudo-Static Row Mappers, a Healthy Alternative to Static Row Mapping

Ryan McCullough Articles, Java, Spring Leave a Comment

If you know Spring, chances are pretty good that you’ve also worked with RowMappers and everyone’s #1 favorite BeanPropertyRowMapper. Okay, maybe not EVERYONE. But EVERYONE will acknowledge BPRM’s power potential and how wonderfully easy it is to use!

While BeanPropertyRowMapper may be the smartest and most beautiful on the RowMapper block, many in the industry refuse to give it the time of day, and for perfectly justified reasons.

Sometimes, when we can’t have beauty and wisdom, we’re forced to settle for loud and predictable. Yes, I’m talking about hardcoded, unchanging, tell-it-like-it-is, static RowMapper. Hate on them all you like, Static RowMappers are fast, easy to understand, and they seem to replicate like tribbles.

But, as many of you know, an application can grow into a swamp of one-off RowMappers. ESPECIALLY if you are working with a lot of high-throughput batch operations that need to run strictly optimized queries for performance as to avoid any unnecessary marshaling of data.

Recently, I’ve tried a mildly clever alternative to RowMapping I like to call Pseudo-Static Row Mappers. In this post, I introduce the basics of Pseudo-Static Row Mappers. We show how they give the tough rigid optimization and control of hard-coded naming and data typing while retaining BeanPropertyRowMapper’s spirit of freedom.

Thoughts on Application State

Mat Warger Articles, AWS, JavaScript, React 1 Comment

Use Redux! Use MobX! Just use `setState`!
Redux is functional! Mobx is reactive! `setState` is built-in!
But Redux has so much boilerplate! But MobX is more difficult to debug! But `setState` doesn’t scale!
Why don’t you just use Rematch to abstract the Redux boilerplate? Do I use redux-thunk? redux-saga? redux-observable?
How about using Unstated? How about just using the Context API?

:head-explodes:

There are a lot of options for developers regarding how and when to use state management libraries (SML).

Remember those last two articles (The Joy of Forms with React and Formik & One Router to Rule Them All: React Router) about the massively underplayed game library? There was a third part to come — a follow-up meant to implement an example of state management for an application. The application was small, granted, but this somewhat contrived example would tie it all up. It’d be the cherry on top. It would complete the rule of threes. 😉

There is not going to be another tutorial about which state library we can use to better manage our game library. Rather, in this post, we’re going to look at how and why you might use a library to manage your application’s state, and why that particular application is a perfect example of when you might not need a SML at all.

Keyhole Sponsoring Azure Dev Days Kansas City 2018

Keyhole Software .NET, Articles, Azure, Cloud, Community, Company News, Educational Event Leave a Comment

We are excited to announce Keyhole’s partnership with Microsoft to sponsor Azure Dev Days, a one-day workshop in Kansas City on Wednesday, April 25, 2018. This is a free community event to provide education on application modernization, microservices, and Microsoft Azure topics.

In addition to providing technical educators for this workshop, Keyhole Software will sponsor food and beverages. The topics Keyhole will champion include Microservices and Containers, as well as App Services.

Each technical session will be followed by a hands-on Azure lab and a whiteboard design exercise. This workshop will help attendees gain a thorough understanding of the components of Azure and how you can take advantage of them as a developer.

This is a traveling community event, with other events available to attend in St. Louis and Oklahoma City. The event will be held at the Microsoft offices in Overland Park…