Gaining Docker Image Size Efficiencies By Separating Application Layers

Luke Patterson Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Java, Spring Boot Leave a Comment

Problem

I was pushing a new Docker image tag for each application code commit, and the admins of the private registry were getting annoyed at how much space I was using.

Solution Summary

Yes, I know there are strategies to clean up old tags but I first wanted to reduce the impact of the tags I was pushing. With the right layering strategy, I knew I could reduce the net registry size increase of consecutive tag pushes.

I wanted to only push what had actually changed in the application. In addition to reducing the impact on the registry, having smaller tag deltas could possibly speed up rolling deployments since nodes could potentially have less to download.

Interactive REST API Documentation with Swagger UI

Bing Liu API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices, REST, Spring, Spring Boot 2 Comments

I am assisting a client that is migrating from a monolithic legacy application to a modern Microservice stack with Spring REST. We are helping to implement Swagger UI to provide both a front-end API UI, as well as to provide a level of documentation at the same time. This implementation has simultaneously met our project requirements, as well as garnering some positive feedback from our client!

Swagger UI is one of the most popular tools to visually render beautiful, interactive API documentation. In this blog, Iโ€™ll use a REST API application to demonstrate some usage of Swagger UI. The source project is available at https://github.com/bingliu2016/spring-boot-rest-swagger2.

Hello Micronaut

Rik Scarborough Articles, Java, Microservices, Testing Leave a Comment

From some of my previous posts, you can get the idea that I promote the idea of developing maintainable code rapidly. So I was pretty excited when I learned that the same group that was responsible for Grails was working on a similar project for Web Services. Hello, Micronaut.

In this post, I provide an introduction to the Micronaut framework and its features to provide a foundation for you to try it out yourself.

OWASP Dependency Check for Vulnerability Reporting

John Hoestje Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Security, Tutorial Leave a Comment

TL;DR:ย Add OWASP Dependency-Check to your build process to get insight into your dependency vulnerabilities.

Recent major data losses and security vulnerabilities in open source frameworks *(and the applications that use them)* have caused the companies that use those frameworks to have elevated concerns regarding vulnerabilities. The elevated awareness is for good reason, too. After all, no one wants to be the next one to lose sensitive data, be the punching bag of others, or be the example of what *not* to do security-wise.

If you happen to be in a group that doesnโ€™t have any open source vulnerability reporting, OWASP Dependency-Check may be your short-term answer to get at least something in place. Adding OWASP Dependency-Check into your build process takes a relatively low effort. Other than not having the technology that stack Dependency-Check can help you with, there isnโ€™t a reason not to at least add Dependency-Check to give a little insight into your open source dependencies.

The following parts will help you get Dependency-Check integrated into your Java projectโ€™s build process. The instructions will be adaptable to the other technologies Dependency-Check supports, like Gradle or JavaScript. Dependency-Check is also available as a command line tool for your favorite OS. In this example, Iโ€™ll use a Java project with Maven….

Reading and Writing from Excel in Spring Batch

Rik Scarborough Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Spring, Spring Batch, Tutorial 4 Comments

We have discussed many different ways to read and write data in Spring Batch. The framework comes with quite an assortment of Readers and Writers that can be used directly or reused in some manner. Most of the time, the requirements consist of reading the data from some type of text file or database.

So what happens when the business we are supporting asks for something out of the ordinary, such as reading an Excel file and outputting the data to another Excel file? Typically the off-the-cuff response would be, โ€œcan you convert it to a CSV or other delimited text file?โ€ Or โ€œYou know, Excel will read a CSV file just fine.โ€ Sometimes that works, and sometimes the business requirements do not allow that type of flexibility.

Consider this scenario; in these days of Cloud and other online computing, the input file is likely created by a server that the company has no direct access to as far as programming. The file it creates is in one format, Excel. The output of your process has to go before several executives or other business clients and needs to be formatted in a professional looking manner. Adding a manual process to import a CSV and format it diminishes the value of using Spring Batch.

For the sake of the honor of the coding profession, you agree to the requirement to read and write from an Excel file directly. Now, how do you do that?…