Month: January 2017

Categories
brightonjava

Speaking at Brighton Java on January 25th

I’m speaking at Brighton Java next week on How to Deploy Java Webapps the Hard Way. It’s currently fully booked, but it’s worth trying the waitlist. The talk looks at some of the issues I’ve written about on this blog, such as the complexities of even simple Java projects. I’ll also consider technical debt and how to cope when problems arise.

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Java Web Development the Hard Way

Tools like Spring Boot now mean that you can produce a working service from a tweet’s worth of code. But too often rushing headlong into production can lead to problems later.

James Burt looks at the work needed to get a supportable Java service into production. Too often, in the hurry to release features, companies pile on technical debt until their code becomes unmanageable. How do you avoid getting into these situations? And what do you do if it’s already happened?

This talk will start with a simple Spring Boot service and look at the tools and techniques that should be added before going live, making a case for a slower, more sustainable pace of development. 

Categories
springboot

The complexity of a simple Java project

I recently built a small prototype using Spring Boot. It wasn’t much of a site, just two forms and two reports. As it was only being demonstrated locally, there was no need to worry about deployment and hosting. What’s fascinating is how many different technologies were used in such a simple piece of development:

  • Java 8
  • Git
  • Gradle
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Security
  • Spring Data
  • Flyway
  • JPA
  • MySQL
  • HTML
  • Thymeleaf
  • Angular
  • CSS
  • Bootstrap
  • REST
  • Webjars
  • JUnit
  • Mockito
  • Jacoco

Obviously, it’s great how easy it is to use so many different technologies together: building software and handling dependencies through gradle is much easier than doing it by hand; using Spring Data to handle persistence saves a huge amount of time and configuration.

Having said that, a full-stack demo in Java has involved a huge number of technologies – 19 in total. Not all of these require competency (and in some, like Angular, I’d like to know a lot more).  Some, like flyway or jacoco could be ignored – although I’d rather have them in place early than add them later.

When I first leaned Java it was relatively straightforward. My first job required Java, HTML, CVS, make, JSP, JDBC and MySQL. I wouldn’t want to return to that era – the applications I produce now are far more sophisticated than anything we could have done back in 2000. But I do wonder how easy it is for new developers to gain confidence and competence in so many tools. Consider how much harder it would be to get a simple site up-and-running in Java compared with PHP.

Which poses an interesting question – how does a new developer get to the point where he or she can produce something interesting? And how can we know that we are using each of these 19 technologies competently and securely?