Migrating to Java 9

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Programming, Spring, Spring Boot Leave a Comment

Java 9, after many delays and failed votes, looks to be finally arriving this September.

Java 9 will bring several new features: enhancements to Streams, a REPL, improvements to Collections, among others. But by far the biggest and most controversial change is Jigsaw. Jigsaw is introducing modularity to the JDK, a long topic in and of itself, but it is one of the major reasons upgrading to Java 9 will be more difficult than previous major releases of Java.

In this blog we will take a look at some of the benefits of running in a Java 9 environment, how to migrate a Spring Boot application to Java 9, and finally review some of the common problems you may run into and strategies for resolving them…

Real-Time Communication: Implementing Websockets With Spring Boot

Thomas Kendall Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, JavaScript, Spring, Spring Boot 3 Comments

When developing web applications, we sometimes need to push server events down to connected clients. However, HTTP was not designed to allow this. To get around this limitation, a polling pattern was established where web pages would intermittently poll the server for any new events. This pattern was not ideal as it added HTTP overhead, was only as fast as the polling rate, and caused unnecessary load on the server.

Luckily, with the emergence of HTML5 came the WebSocket. The WebSocket protocol enables interaction between a browser and a web server with lower overheads. In this blog we’ll introduce the Websockets API and show how to implement Websockets with Spring Boot.

Auto-Publishing & Monitoring APIs With Spring Boot

David Pitt API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Keyhole Creations, Microservices, REST, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

If you are heading down the path of a Microservices style of architecture, one tenant you will need to embrace is automation. Many moving parts are introduced with this style of architecture. If successful, your environment will have a plethora of service APIs available that the enterprise can consume for application development and integration.

This means that there must be a way that available API documentation can be discovered. API information needs to be effectively communicated throughout the enterprise that shows where APIs are used, how often APIs are used, and when APIs change. Not having this type of monitoring in place will hinder and possibly cripple the agility benefits that a Microservice style of architecture can bring to the enterprise.

This blog will describe how Swagger/OpenAPI documentation can be applied to aย Spring Boot implementation. We will show how API documentation and monitoring can be automatically published toย an API documentation portal.

As an example, we introduce a reference Spring Boot API CRUD application (using Spring MVC/Data with Spring Fox) and set up the automatic publishing of API documentation and statistics to documentation portal GrokOla. In the example, we introduce two open source utilitiesย to help and allow published APIs the ability toย be searched and notify users whenย changed….

Cobol to Java

Adventures In Modernization: Strategy + Example Converting COBOL To Java

Dallas Monson Articles, COBOL, Consulting, Development Technologies & Tools, DevOps, Java, Keyhole Creations, Modernization, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

We have consultants who specialize in moving old to new, renovating dilapidated code bases, and designing brighter futures for enterprises who have been vendor-locked for most of their existence. We have come across some repeated patterns and strategies for how to approach modernization of legacy systems. In this blog, we will cover a strategy that is very popular right now, Re-Platforming.

The basic flow of this post will be:

Introduction to Modernization
High-level definition of the Re-Platforming Strategy for Modernization
Sample of Re-Platforming using Keyhole Syntax Tree Transformer, COBOL –> Java
Additional thoughts on the value/risk of this strategy

Let’s get started…