Rethinking REST Practices: An Introduction to GraphQL with AWS AppSync

Mat Warger API Development, Articles, AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, JavaScript, Programming, REST Leave a Comment

The basic premise of data transfer and involves requesting and receiving lists. This is simplistic, but it gets to the root of why we’ve developed the technologies and best practices to pass data using web services. RESTful APIs have grown to serve the needs of numerous individuals, startups, and enterprise companies across the world. They are useful, productive, and the concepts surrounding them are relatively standardized. If you don’t know how to create one, you can quickly find information building a great API that can grow to fit your needs. That’s when things get complicated…

If you start digging into REST, you’ll realize there’s quite a bit more to throwing lists. There are common threads that many people encounter when developing an API, and you begin to encounter many of the same questions so many others have before, such as: How strictly should you adhere to the principles of REST? How should you handle versioning? Should you bother? How do you want to structure your objects? Are users able to easily figure out what API endpoints are available and how they should be used?

There are many ways approach these. It boils down to communicating the structures that a given endpoint will return or accept. The cascade of questions that results from the choices made here will ripple through from the back-end to the client. The secondary issue is that these questions and choices are not at all uncommon. There are answers to these that follow Best Practices. But there is still plenty of ambiguity involved when attempting to build a flexible API that works well. These are the Commonly Tolerated Situations.

If you hadn’t already guessed, there is a solution that frees us from the dogma of REST and allows us to solve all these issues in a declarative, powerful, and fun way. That solution is GraphQL. In this blog, I’ll provide an introduction to the GraphQL specification with code examples…

What’s New in JUnit 5.2

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Effective Automated Testing With Spring Series, Java, Testing Leave a Comment

The JUnit team continues to make great progress in adding new features and enhancements to the JUnit 5 framework. We already have a second significant feature update after just seven months from the initial release of JUnit 5.

In this article, we look at some of the key features and enhancements added in JUnit 5.2 which was released on April 29th. We’ll focus on build tool enhancements that help in the adoption/migration to JUnit 5 for existing test suites and resolve annoyances, as well as what new changes further improve parameterized tests.

AWS Lambda with Spring Boot

Greg Emerick Articles, AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Spring, Spring Boot 12 Comments

The typical deployment scenario for a Spring Boot application in AWS involves running the Java application on an EC2 instance 24 hours a day. Of course, the application could be deployed in AWS ECS as a Docker container, but it still runs continuously on an EC2 instance. In each case, the EC2 instances need to be monitored and you pay for compute capacity used by that EC2 instance.

AWS Lambda provides low cost compute with zero maintenance. Lambda runs your code on demand, without provisioned and managed servers. Lambda automatically runs and scales your code. You are charged for every 100ms your code executes and the number of times your code is triggered. If the code isn’t running, you pay nothing.

Lambda has clear cost and maintenance benefits. But what does it take to run the standard Spring Boot application as a Lambda? How does it work? What are the drawbacks? These are the questions that will be answered in this blog through a tangible example…

Spring Boot Profiles: A Strategic Way to Configure Applications

Greg Rice Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Spring, Spring Boot 1 Comment

Most applications use properties as variables or parameters that have been extracted from the main logic and injected into the application at runtime. Traditionally, these properties existed in files deployed to the server.

One application of Spring Boot is the Profile feature, which allows developers to place related properties and their values into application properties files, thus allowing deployment scripts to refer to the logical groupings of properties with a single environment variable reference at runtime, which greatly simplifies the application.

In this blog, I’ll provide an introduction to Spring Boot Profiles, showing Profiles in action with tangible code examples…

Why Am I Writing This Test?

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Effective Automated Testing With Spring Series, Testing Leave a Comment

… The highlight of this episode for me was when Dan laid out the three major concerns of automated tests. I hadn’t previously heard all the major purposes for automated testing laid out in such a succinct fashion. They are paraphrased:

Using Tests to Specify the Requirements of the System
Using Tests to Document the System
Using Tests to Build Confidence in the System

With purpose in mind, it is good practice for both developers and automated testers to ask themselves the following questions when writing a test: Why am I writing this test? Am I specifying system requirements? Documenting system behavior? Building confidence in the system? I’m a firm believer that asking the right questions when writing tests can lead to a better design for individual tests, in addition to more coherent and effective automated test suites.

In this article, we look into the three major purposes for writing automated unit tests. We discuss how they should be approached and what developers and automated testers can do right now to establish better, more purposeful, practices.