For some reason I needed extremely large, possibly even infinite InputStream that would simply return the same byte[]over and over. This way I could produce insanely big stream of data by repeating small sample. Sort of similar functionality can be found in Guava: Iterable Iterables.cycle(Iterable) and Iterator Iterators.cycle(Iterator). For example if you need an infinite source of 0 and 1, simply sayIterables.cycle(0, 1) and get 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1... infinitely. Unfortunately I haven't found such utility forInputStream, so I jumped into writing my own. This article documents many mistakes I made during that process, mostly due to overcomplicating and overengineering straightforward solution. We don't really need an infinite InputStream, being able to create very large one (say, 32 GiB) is enough. So we are after the following method: public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) It basically takes sample array of bytes and returns an InputStream returning these bytes. However when sample runs out, it rolls over, returning the same bytes again - this process is repeated given number of times, until InputStreamsignals end. One solution that I haven't really tried but which seems most obvious: public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) { final byte[] allBytes = new byte[sample.length * times]; for (int i = 0; i < times; i++) { System.arraycopy(sample, 0, allBytes, i * sample.length, sample.length); } return new ByteArrayInputStream(allBytes); } I see you laughing there! If sample is 100 bytes and we need 32 GiB of input repeating these 100 bytes, generatedInputStream shouldn't really allocate 32 GiB of memory, we must be more clever here. As a matter of fact repeat()above has another subtle bug. Arrays in Java are limited to 231-1 entries (int), 32 GiB is way above that. The reason this program compiles is a silent integer overflow here: sample.length * times. This multiplication doesn't fit in int. OK, let's try something that at least theoretically can work. My first idea was as follows: what if I create manyByteArrayInputStreams sharing the same byte[] sample (they don't do an eager copy) and somehow join them together? Thus I needed some InputStream adapter that could take arbitrary number of underlying InputStreams and chain them together - when first stream is exhausted, switch to next one. This awkward moment when you look for something in Apache Commons or Guava and apparently it was in the JDK forever... java.io.SequenceInputStream is almost ideal. However it can only chain precisely two underlying InputStreams. Of course since SequenceInputStreamis an InputStream itself, we can use it recursively as an argument to outer SequenceInputStream. Repeating this process we can chain arbitrary number of ByteArrayInputStreams together: public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) { if (times <= 1) { return new ByteArrayInputStream(sample); } else { return new SequenceInputStream( new ByteArrayInputStream(sample), repeat(sample, times - 1) ); } } If times is 1, just wrap sample in ByteArrayInputStream. Otherwise use SequenceInputStream recursively. I think you can immediately spot what's wrong with this code: too deep recursion. Nesting level is the same as times argument, which will reach millions or even billions. There must be a better way. Luckily minor improvement changes recursion depth from O(n) to O(logn): public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) { if (times <= 1) { return new ByteArrayInputStream(sample); } else { return new SequenceInputStream( repeat(sample, times / 2), repeat(sample, times - times / 2) ); } } Honestly this was the first implementation I tried. It's a simple application of divide and conquer principle, where we produce result by evenly splitting it into two smaller sub-problems. Looks clever, but there is one issue: it's easy to prove we create t (t = times) ByteArrayInputStreams and O(t) SequenceInputStreams. While sample byte array is shared, millions of various InputStream instances are wasting memory. This leads us to alternative implementation, creating just one InputStream, regardless value of times: import com.google.common.collect.Iterators; import org.apache.commons.lang3.ArrayUtils; public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) { final Byte[] objArray = ArrayUtils.toObject(sample); final Iterator infinite = Iterators.cycle(objArray); final Iterator limited = Iterators.limit(infinite, sample.length * times); return new InputStream() { @Override public int read() throws IOException { return limited.hasNext() ? limited.next() & 0xFF : -1; } }; } We will use Iterators.cycle() after all. But before we have to translate byte[] into Byte[] since iterators can only work with objets, not primitives. There is no idiomatic way to turn array of primitives to array of boxed types, so I useArrayUtils.toObject(byte[]) from Apache Commons Lang. Having an array of objects we can create an infiniteiterator that cycles through values of sample. Since we don't want an infinite stream, we cut off infinite iterator usingIterators.limit(Iterator, int), again from Guava. Now we just have to bridge from Iterator toInputStream - after all semantically they represent the same thing. This solution suffers two problems. First of all it produces tons of garbage due to unboxing. Garbage collection is not that much concerned about dead, short-living objects, but still seems wasteful. Second issue we already faced previously:sample.length * times multiplication can cause integer overflow. It can't be fixed because Iterators.limit() takesint, not long - for no good reason. BTW we avoided third problem by doing bitwise and with 0xFF - otherwise byte with value -1 would signal end of stream, which is not the case. x & 0xFF is correctly translated to unsigned 255 (int). So even though implementation above is short and sweet, declarative rather than imperative, it's too slow and limited. If you have a C background, I can imagine how uncomfortable you were seeing me struggle. After all the most straightforward, painfully simple and low-level implementation was the one I came up with last: public static InputStream repeat(byte[] sample, int times) { return new InputStream() { private long pos = 0; private final long total = (long)sample.length * times; public int read() throws IOException { return pos < total ? sample[(int)(pos++ % sample.length)] : -1; } }; } GC free, pure JDK, fast and simple to understand. Let this be a lesson for you: start with the simplest solution that jumps to your mind, don't overengineer and don't be too smart. My previous solutions, declarative, functional, immutable, etc. - maybe they looked clever, but they were neither fast nor easy to understand. The utility we just developed was not just a toy project, it will be used later in subsequent article.

This is a first post in a series of short code snippets that will present the configuration of Spring beans from XML to Java. XML: resource.loader=class class.resource.loader.class=org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader.ClasspathResourceLoader Java @Bean public VelocityEngine velocityEngine() throws VelocityException, IOException{ VelocityEngineFactoryBean factory = new VelocityEngineFactoryBean(); Properties props = new Properties(); props.put("resource.loader", "class"); props.put("class.resource.loader.class", "org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader." + "ClasspathResourceLoader"); factory.setVelocityProperties(props); return factory.createVelocityEngine(); }

this article illustrates the general time - memory tradeoff with the example of different hash table implementations in java. the more memory a hash table takes, the faster each operation (e. g. getting a value by key or putting an entry) is performed. benchmarking method hash maps with int keys and int values were tested. memory measure is relative usage over theoretical minimum. for example, 1000 entries of int key and value take at least (4 (size of int) + 4) * 1000 = 8000 bytes. if the hash map implementation takes 20 000 bytes, it's memory overuse is (20 000 - 8000) / 8000 = 1.5. each implementation was benchmarked on 9 different load levels (load factors). on each load level, each map was filled with 10 numbers of entries, logariphmically evenly distributed bewteen 1000 and 10 000 000 (to study caching effects). then, for the same implementation and load level, memory metrics and average operation throughputs are averaged independently, over 3 smallest sizes (small sizes), 3 largest sizes (large sizes) and all 10 sizes from 1000 to 10 000 000 (all sizes). implementations: higher frequency trading collections (hftc) high performance primitive collections (hppc) fastutil collections goldman sachs collections (gs) trove collections mahout collections java.util.hashmap as a reference get value by key (successful) only looking at these charts, you can suppose that hftc, trove and mahout on the one size, fastutil, hppc and gs on the another use the same hash table algorithm. (in fact, it is not quite true.) sparser hash table on average performs less lookups during key search, therefore less memory reads, therefore the operation finishes earlier. notice, that on small sizes the largest maps are the fastest for all implementations, but on large and all sizes there isn't visible progress starting from memory overuse ~4. that's because when the total memory taken by the map goes beyond cpu cache capacity, cache misses become more often when the map is getting larger. this effect compensates algorithic trend. update (increment) value by key update operation behaves pretty similar to get(). fastutil wasn't benchmarked, because there aren't fairly performant method for this task in it's api. put an entry (key was absent) in this case, maps were gradually filled in with the entries from the size 0 to the target size (1000 - 10 000 000). rehash shouldn't occur, because maps were constructed with the target size provided. for small sizes, plots still looks like hyperbolas, but i can't explain so dramatic change on large sizes and differences between hftc and other primitive implementations. internal iteration (foreach) iteration is getting slower with memory usage growth. interesting thing about external iteration: for all open hash table implementations throughtput depends only memory usage, not even on load factor (which differs for implementations for the same memory usage). also, foreach throughput don't depend on open hash table size. external iteration (via iterator or cursor) external iteration performance is more varying than internal, because there is more freedom for optimization. hftc and trove employ own iteration interfaces, other libraries use standard java.util.iterator . footnote raw benchmark results from which the pictures were built with a link to the benchmarking code and information about the runsite in description.

In this post we explore 5 reasons to use a Java Data Grid for caching Java objects in-memory in your applications. In a later post we will explore some of the other data grid capabilities, beyond data storage, that can revolutionize your Java architectures, like on-grid computation and events. Memory is Fast Java Data Grids store Java objects in memory. Memory access is fast with low latency. So if access to data storage either disk or database is the primary bottleneck in your application then using a data grid as an in-memory cache in front of your storage tier will give you a performance boost. Scale out your Application Shared State If you need to share state across JVMs to scale out your application then using a Java Data Grid rather than a database will increase your scalability. A typical shared state architecture is shown below, the application server tier stores shared Java objects in the data grid and these objects are available to all application server nodes in your architecture. Separating the data grid tier from the application server tier has a number of advantages; Applications can be redeployed and restarted without losing the shared state Data Grid JVMs and Application JVMs can be tuned separately State can be shared across multiple different applications. Each tier can be scaled horizontally separately depending on work load Typical use cases for shared state include; PCI compliant storage of card security codes; In-game state in online games; web session data; prices and catalogues in ecommerce. Anything that needs low latency access can be stored in the shared data grid. High Availability for In-Memory Data As well as low latency access and scaling out shared state. Java Data Grids also provide high availability for your in-memory data. When storing Java objects in a data grid a primary object is stored in one of the Data Grid JVMs and secondary back up copies of the object are stored in different Data Grid JVM node, ensuring that if you lose a node then you don't lose any data. Clients of the data grid do not need to know where data is to access it so high availability is transparent to your application. Scale Out In-Memory Data Volumes Java objects, in data grids, aren't fully replicated across all Data Grid JVMs but are stored as a primary object and a secondary object. This means the more Data Grid JVM nodes we add the more JVM heap we have for storing Java objects in-memory (and remember memory is fast). For example if we build a Data Grid with 20 JVMs each with 4Gb free heap (after per JVM overhead) we could theoretically store 80Gb (4 times 20) of shared Java objects. If we assume we have 1 duplicate for high availability this cuts our storage in half so we can store 40Gb (.5 time 4 times 20 ) of Java Objects in memory. Native Integration with JPA Java Data Grids have native integration with JPA frameworks like TopLink and Hibernate whereby the Data Grid can act as a second level cache between JPA and the database. This can give a large performance boost to your database driven application if latency associated with database access is a key performance bottleneck.

This is a sample that I have wanted to try for sometime - A Websocket application to tail the contents of a file. The following is the final view of the web-application: There are a few parts to this application: Generating a File to tail: I chose to use a set of 100 random quotes as a source of the file content, every few seconds the application generates a quote and writes this quote to the temporary file. Spring Integration is used for wiring this flow for writing the contents to the file: Just a quick note, Spring Integration flows can now also be written using a Java Based DSL, and this flow using Java is available here Tailing the file and sending the content to a broker The actual tailing of the file itself can be accomplished by OS specific tail command or by using a library like Apache Commons IO. Again in my case I decided to use Spring Integration which provides Inbound channel adapters to tail a file purely using configuration, this flow looks like this: and its working Java equivalent There is a reference to a "fileContentRecordingService" above, this is the component which will direct the lines of the file to a place where the Websocket client will subscribe to. Websocket server configuration Spring Websocket support makes it super simple to write a Websocket based application, in this instance the entire working configuration is the following: @Configuration @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker public class WebSocketDefaultConfig extends AbstractWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer { @Override public void configureMessageBroker(MessageBrokerRegistry config) { //config.enableStompBrokerRelay("/topic/", "/queue/"); config.enableSimpleBroker("/topic/", "/queue/"); config.setApplicationDestinationPrefixes("/app"); } @Override public void registerStompEndpoints(StompEndpointRegistry registry) { registry.addEndpoint("/tailfilesep").withSockJS(); } } This may seem a little over the top, but what these few lines of configuration does is very powerful and the configuration can be better understood by going through the reference here. In brief, it sets up a websocket endpoint at '/tailfileep' uri, this endpoint is enhanced with SockJS support, Stomp is used as a sub-protocol, endpoints `/topic` and `/queue` is configured to a real broker like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ but in this specific to an in-memory one. Going back to the "fileContentRecordingService" once more, this component essentially takes the line of the file and sends it this in-memory broker, SimpMessagingTemplate facilitates this wiring: public class FileContentRecordingService { @Autowired private SimpMessagingTemplate simpMessagingTemplate; public void sendLinesToTopic(String line) { this.simpMessagingTemplate.convertAndSend("/topic/tailfiles", line); } } Websocket UI configuration The UI is angularjs based, the client controller is set up this way and internally uses the javascript libraries for sockjs and stomp support: var tailFilesApp = angular.module("tailFilesApp",[]); tailFilesApp.controller("TailFilesCtrl", function ($scope) { function init() { $scope.buffer = new CircularBuffer(20); } $scope.initSockets = function() { $scope.socket={}; $scope.socket.client = new SockJS("/tailfilesep); $scope.socket.stomp = Stomp.over($scope.socket.client); $scope.socket.stomp.connect({}, function() { $scope.socket.stomp.subscribe("/topic/tailfiles", $scope.notify); }); $scope.socket.client.onclose = $scope.reconnect; }; $scope.notify = function(message) { $scope.$apply(function() { $scope.buffer.add(angular.fromJson(message.body)); }); }; $scope.reconnect = function() { setTimeout($scope.initSockets, 10000); }; init(); $scope.initSockets(); }); The meat of this code is the "notify" function which the callback acting on the messages from the server, in this instance the new lines coming into the file and showing it in a textarea. This wraps up the entire application to tail a file. A complete working sample without any external dependencies is available at this github location, instructions to start it up is also available at that location. Conclusion Spring Websockets provides a concise way to create Websocket based applications, this sample provides a good demonstration of this support. I had presented on this topic recently at my local JUG (IndyJUG) and a deck with the presentation is available here

Continuing from the first article, this time we will write some more useful custom collectors: for grouping by given criteria, sampling input, batching and sliding over with fixed size window. Grouping (counting occurrences, histogram) Imagine you have a collection of some items and you want to calculate how many times each item (with respect to equals()) appears in this collection. This can be achieved using CollectionUtils.getCardinalityMap() from Apache Commons Collections. This method takes an Iterable and returns Map, counting how many times each item appeared in the collection. However sometimes instead of usingequals() we would like to group by an arbitrary attribute of input T. For example say we have a list of Person objects and we would like to compute the number of males vs. females (i.e. Map) or maybe an age distribution. There is a built-in collector Collectors.groupingBy(Function classifier) - however it returns a map from key to all items mapped to that key. See: import static java.util.stream.Collectors.groupingBy; //... final List people = //... final Map> bySex = people .stream() .collect(groupingBy(Person::getSex)); It's valuable, but in our case unnecessarily builds two List. I only want to know the number of people. There is no such collector built-in, but we can compose it in a fairly simple manner: import static java.util.stream.Collectors.counting; import static java.util.stream.Collectors.groupingBy; //... final Map bySex = people .stream() .collect( groupingBy(Person::getSex, HashMap::new, counting())); This overloaded version of groupingBy() takes three parameters. First one is the key (classifier) function, as previously. Second argument creates a new map, we'll see shortly why it's useful. counting() is a nested collector that takes all people with same sex and combines them together - in our case simply counting them as they arrive. Being able to choose map implementation is useful e.g. when building age histogram. We would like to know how many people we have at given age - but age values should be sorted: final TreeMap byAge = people .stream() .collect( groupingBy(Person::getAge, TreeMap::new, counting())); byAge .forEach((age, count) -> System.out.println(age + ":\t" + count)); We ended up with a TreeMap from age (sorted) to count of people having that age. Sampling, batching and sliding window IterableLike.sliding() method in Scala allows to view a collection through a sliding fixed-size window. This window starts at the beginning and in each iteration moves by given number of items. Such functionality, missing in Java 8, allows several useful operators like computing moving average, splitting big collection into batches (compare with Lists.partition() in Guava) or sampling every n-th element. We will implement collector for Java 8 providing similar behaviour. Let's start from unit tests, which should describe briefly what we want to achieve: import static com.nurkiewicz.CustomCollectors.sliding @Unroll class CustomCollectorsSpec extends Specification { def "Sliding window of #input with size #size and step of 1 is #output"() { expect: input.stream().collect(sliding(size)) == output where: input | size | output [] | 5 | [] [1] | 1 | [[1]] [1, 2] | 1 | [[1], [2]] [1, 2] | 2 | [[1, 2]] [1, 2] | 3 | [[1, 2]] 1..3 | 3 | [[1, 2, 3]] 1..4 | 2 | [[1, 2], [2, 3], [3, 4]] 1..4 | 3 | [[1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4]] 1..7 | 3 | [[1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4], [3, 4, 5], [4, 5, 6], [5, 6, 7]] 1..7 | 6 | [1..6, 2..7] } def "Sliding window of #input with size #size and no overlapping is #output"() { expect: input.stream().collect(sliding(size, size)) == output where: input | size | output [] | 5 | [] 1..3 | 2 | [[1, 2], [3]] 1..4 | 4 | [1..4] 1..4 | 5 | [1..4] 1..7 | 3 | [1..3, 4..6, [7]] 1..6 | 2 | [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]] } def "Sliding window of #input with size #size and some overlapping is #output"() { expect: input.stream().collect(sliding(size, 2)) == output where: input | size | output [] | 5 | [] 1..4 | 5 | [[1, 2, 3, 4]] 1..7 | 3 | [1..3, 3..5, 5..7] 1..6 | 4 | [1..4, 3..6] 1..9 | 4 | [1..4, 3..6, 5..8, 7..9] 1..10 | 4 | [1..4, 3..6, 5..8, 7..10] 1..11 | 4 | [1..4, 3..6, 5..8, 7..10, 9..11] } def "Sliding window of #input with size #size and gap of #gap is #output"() { expect: input.stream().collect(sliding(size, size + gap)) == output where: input | size | gap | output [] | 5 | 1 | [] 1..9 | 4 | 2 | [1..4, 7..9] 1..10 | 4 | 2 | [1..4, 7..10] 1..11 | 4 | 2 | [1..4, 7..10] 1..12 | 4 | 2 | [1..4, 7..10] 1..13 | 4 | 2 | [1..4, 7..10, [13]] 1..13 | 5 | 1 | [1..5, 7..11, [13]] 1..12 | 5 | 3 | [1..5, 9..12] 1..13 | 5 | 3 | [1..5, 9..13] } def "Sampling #input taking every #nth th element is #output"() { expect: input.stream().collect(sliding(1, nth)) == output where: input | nth | output [] | 1 | [] [] | 5 | [] 1..3 | 5 | [[1]] 1..6 | 2 | [[1], [3], [5]] 1..10 | 5 | [[1], [6]] 1..100 | 30 | [[1], [31], [61], [91]] } } Using data driven tests in Spock I managed to write almost 40 test cases in no-time, succinctly describing all requirements. I hope these are clear for you, even if you haven't seen this syntax before. I already assumed existence of handy factory methods: public class CustomCollectors { public static Collector>> sliding(int size) { return new SlidingCollector<>(size, 1); } public static Collector>> sliding(int size, int step) { return new SlidingCollector<>(size, step); } } The fact that collectors receive items one after another makes are job harder. Of course first collecting the whole list and sliding over it would have been easier, but sort of wasteful. Let's build result iteratively. I am not even pretending this task can be parallelized in general, so I'll leave combiner() unimplemented: public class SlidingCollector implements Collector>, List>> { private final int size; private final int step; private final int window; private final Queue buffer = new ArrayDeque<>(); private int totalIn = 0; public SlidingCollector(int size, int step) { this.size = size; this.step = step; this.window = max(size, step); } @Override public Supplier>> supplier() { return ArrayList::new; } @Override public BiConsumer>, T> accumulator() { return (lists, t) -> { buffer.offer(t); ++totalIn; if (buffer.size() == window) { dumpCurrent(lists); shiftBy(step); } }; } @Override public Function>, List>> finisher() { return lists -> { if (!buffer.isEmpty()) { final int totalOut = estimateTotalOut(); if (totalOut > lists.size()) { dumpCurrent(lists); } } return lists; }; } private int estimateTotalOut() { return max(0, (totalIn + step - size - 1) / step) + 1; } private void dumpCurrent(List> lists) { final List batch = buffer.stream().limit(size).collect(toList()); lists.add(batch); } private void shiftBy(int by) { for (int i = 0; i < by; i++) { buffer.remove(); } } @Override public BinaryOperator>> combiner() { return (l1, l2) -> { throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Combining not possible"); }; } @Override public Set characteristics() { return EnumSet.noneOf(Characteristics.class); } } I spent quite some time writing this implementation, especially correct finisher() so don't be frightened. The crucial part is a buffer that collects items until it can form one sliding window. Then "oldest" items are discarded and window slides forward by step. I am not particularly happy with this implementation, but tests are passing. sliding(N)(synonym to sliding(N, 1)) will allow calculating moving average of N items.sliding(N, N) splits input into batches of size N. sliding(1, N) takes every N-th element (samples). I hope you'll find this collector useful, enjoy!

Read about enhanced identifier generators, like JPA and Hibernate.

Retrieving JMX information for a Java process is very easy when using a tool such as JConsole or JVisualVM. These provide an interface that allows viewing of information such as CPU usage, memory usage, threads active and more. This blog post gives an example of how to retrieve such information programmatically. In order to retrieve JMX information from a Java application, the target application must be configured to expose JMX information. This link shows how to do this. As an example, we shall be retrieving CPU and memory usage from a standalone Mule instance. In Mule, the JMX agent may be configured from a Mule configuration file. Through this, one may set the address that a JMX client can use to retrieve information; this is how. The following Java code allows for polling the JMX agent and retrieving memory, CPU usage and also shows how to remotely invoke the garbage collector: // create jmx connection with mules jmx agent JMXServiceURL url = new JMXServiceURL("service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:1098/server"); JMXConnector jmxc = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(url, null); jmxc.connect(); //create object instances that will be used to get memory and operating system Mbean objects exposed by JMX; create variables for cpu time and system time before Object memoryMbean = null; Object osMbean = null; long cpuBefore = 0; long tempMemory = 0; CompositeData cd = null; cpuBefore = Long.parseLong(a.toString()); // call the garbage collector before the test using the Memory Mbean jmxc.getMBeanServerConnection().invoke(new ObjectName("java.lang:type=Memory"), "gc", null, null); //create a loop to get values every second (optional) for (int i = 0; i < samplesCount; i++) { //get an instance of the HeapMemoryUsage Mbean memoryMbean = jmxc.getMBeanServerConnection().getAttribute(new ObjectName("java.lang:type=Memory"), "HeapMemoryUsage"); cd = (CompositeData) memoryMbean; //get an instance of the OperatingSystem Mbean osMbean = jmxc.getMBeanServerConnection().getAttribute(new ObjectName("java.lang:type=OperatingSystem"),"ProcessCpuTime"); System.out.println("Used memory: " + " " + cd.get("used") + " Used cpu: " + osMbean); //print memory usage tempMemory = tempMemory + Long.parseLong(cd.get("used").toString()); Thread.sleep(1000); //delay for one second } //get system time and cpu time from last poll long cpuAfter = Long.parseLong(osMbean.toString()); long cpuDiff = cpuAfter - cpuBefore; //find cpu time between our first and last jmx poll System.out.println("Cpu diff in milli seconds: " + cpuDiff / 1000000); //print cpu time in miliseconds System.out.println("average memory usage is: " + tempMemory / samplesCount);//print average memory usage The above example prints: ... Used memory: 23376624 Used cpu: 38060000000 Used memory: 24020624 Used cpu: 38080000000 Used memory: 24621920 Used cpu: 38090000000 Cpu diff in milli seconds: 4230 average memory usage is: 28028204 When the JMX agent may not be enabled for a Java process, it is also possible to retrieve information by fetching the process by id, for example. The following code shows how to do this using Sigar API: //create a sigar object Sigar sigar = new Sigar(); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ProcessFinder find = new ProcessFinder(sigar); //get the list of current java processes, and optionally query the list to choose which process to monitor long[] pidList = sigar.getProcList(); //assuming we know the process id, we may query the process finder long pid = find.findSingleProcess("Pid.Pid.eq=54730"); //get memory info for the process id ProcMem memory = new ProcMem(); memory.gather(sigar, pid); //get cou info for the oricess id ProcCpu cpu = new ProcCpu(); cpu.gather(sigar, pid); //print the memory used by the process id System.out.println("Current memory used: " + Long.toString(memory.getSize())); //print all memory info System.out.println(memory.toMap()); //print all cpu info System.out.println(cpu.toMap()); Thread.sleep(1000); } This is displayed when running the above example: Current memory used: 3257659392 {Resident=258789376, PageFaults=109613, Size=3257659392} {User=34973, LastTime=1404467787774, Percent=0.0, StartTime=1404467383826, Total=38121, Sys=3148}

Get an overview of the Java observer pattern using an inventory example.

Get familiar with the Angular JS origin story.

Learn about Identity, Sequence, and Table in Hibernate.

Spring Security offers an authentication replacement feature, often referred to as Run-As, that can replace the current user's authentication (and thus permissions) during a single secured object invocation. Using this feature makes sense when a backend system invoked during request processing requires different privileges than the current application. For example, an application might want to expose a financial transaction log to the currently logged in user, but the backend system that provides it only permits this action to the members of a special "auditor" role. The application can not simply assign this role to the user as that would potentially permit them to execute other restricted actions. Instead, the user can be given this right exclusively for viewing their transaction log. Only two classes are used to implement this feature. Instances of RunAsManager are tasked with producing the actual replacement authentication tokens. A sensible default implementation is already provided by Spring Security. As with other types of authentication, it is also necessary to register an instance of an appropriate AuthenticationProvider. Tokens produced by runAsManager are signed with the provided key (my_run_as_key in the example above) and are later checked against the same key by runAsAuthenticationProvider, in order to mitigate the risk of fake tokens being provided. These keys can have any value, but need to be the same in both objects. Otherwise, runAsAuthenticationProvider will reject the produced tokens as invalid. If an instance is registered, RunAsManager will be invoked by AbstractSecurityInterceptor for every intercepted object invocation for which the user has already been given access. If RunAsManager returns a token, this token will be used be used instead of the original one for the duration of the invocation, thus granting the user different privileges. There are two key points here. In order for the authentication replacement feature to do anything, the call has to actually be secured (and thus intercepted), and the user has to already have been granted access. To register a RunAsManager instance with the method security interceptor, something similar to the following is needed: Now, all methods secured by the @Secured annotation will be able to trigger RunAsManager. One important point here is that global-method-security will only work in the Spring context in which it is defined. In Spring MVC applications, there usually are two Spring contexts: the parent context, attached to ContextLoaderListener, and the child context, attached toDispatcherServlet. To secure Controller methods in this way, global-method-security must be added to DispatcherServlet's context. To secure methods in beans not in this context, global-method-security should also be added to ContextLoaderListener's context. Otherwise, security annotations will be ignored. The default implementation of RunAsManager (RunAsManagerImpl) will inspect the secured object's configuration and if it finds any attributes prefixed with RUN_AS_, it will create a token identical to the original, with the addition of one new GrantedAuthorty per RUN_AS_ attribute found. The new GrantedAuthority will be a role (prefixed by ROLE_ by default) named like the found attribute without the RUN_AS_ prefix. So, if a user with a role ROLE_REGISTERED_USER invokes a method annotated with @Secured({"ROLE_REGISTERED_USER","RUN_AS_AUDITOR"}), e.g. @Controller public class TransactionLogController { @Secured({"ROLE_REGISTERED_USER","RUN_AS_AUDITOR"}) //Authorities needed for method access and authorities added by RunAsManager prefixed with RUN_AS_ @RequestMapping(value = "/transactions", method = RequestMethod.GET) //Spring MVC configuration. Not related to security @ResponseBody //Spring MVC configuration. Not related to security public List getTransactionLog(...) { ... //Invoke something in the backend requiring ROLE_AUDITOR { ... //User does not have ROLE_AUDITOR here } the resulting token created by RunAsManagerImpl with be granted ROLE_REGISTERED_USER and ROLE_AUDITOR. Thus, the user will also be allowed actions, normally reserved for ROLE_AUDITOR members, during the current invocation, permitting them, in this case, to access the transaction log.To enable runAsAuthenticationProvider, register it as usual: ... other authentication-providers used by the application ... This is all that is necessary to have the default implementation activated. Still, this setting will not work for methods secured by @PreAuthorize and @PostAuthorize annotations as their configuration attributes are differently evaluated (they are SpEL expressions and not a simple list or required authorities like with @Secured) and will not be recognized by RunAsManagerImpl. For this scenario to work, a custom RunAsManager implementation is required, as, at least at the time of writing, no applicable implementation is provided by Spring. A custom RunAsManager implementation for use with @PreAuthorize/@PostAuthorize A convenient implementation relying on a custom annotation is provided below: public class AnnotationDrivenRunAsManager extends RunAsManagerImpl { @Override public Authentication buildRunAs(Authentication authentication, Object object, Collection attributes) { if(!(object instanceof ReflectiveMethodInvocation) || ((ReflectiveMethodInvocation)object).getMethod().getAnnotation(RunAsRole.class) == null) { return super.buildRunAs(authentication, object, attributes); } String roleName = ((ReflectiveMethodInvocation)object).getMethod().getAnnotation(RunAsRole.class).value(); if (roleName == null || roleName.isEmpty()) { return null; } GrantedAuthority runAsAuthority = new SimpleGrantedAuthority(roleName); List newAuthorities = new ArrayList(); // Add existing authorities newAuthorities.addAll(authentication.getAuthorities()); // Add the new run-as authority newAuthorities.add(runAsAuthority); return new RunAsUserToken(getKey(), authentication.getPrincipal(), authentication.getCredentials(), newAuthorities, authentication.getClass()); } } This implementation will look for a custom @RunAsRole annotation on a protected method (e.g. @RunAsRole("ROLE_AUDITOR")) and, if found, will add the given authority (ROLE_AUDITOR in this case) to the list of granted authorities. RunAsRole itself is just a simple custom annotation: @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @Target(ElementType.METHOD) public @interface RunAsRole { String value(); } This new implementation would be instantiated in the same way as before: And registered in a similar fashion: The expression-handler is always required for pre-post-annotations to work. It is a part of the standard Spring Security configuration, and not related to the topic described here. Both pre-post-annotations and secured-annotations can be enabled at the same time, but should never be used in the same class. The protected controller method from above could now look like this: @Controller public class TransactionLogController { @PreAuthorize("hasRole('ROLE_REGISTERED_USER')") //Authority needed to access the method @RunAsRole("ROLE_AUDITOR") //Authority added by RunAsManager @RequestMapping(value = "/transactions", method = RequestMethod.GET) //Spring MVC configuration. Not related to security @ResponseBody //Spring MVC configuration. Not related to security public List getTransactionLog(...) { ... //Invoke something in the backend requiring ROLE_AUDITOR { ... //User does not have ROLE_AUDITOR here }

SpringBoot...there is a lot of buzz about SpringBoot nowadays. So what is SpringBoot? SpringBoot is a new spring portfolio project which takes opinionated view of building production-ready Spring applications by drastically reducing the amount of configuration required. Spring Boot is taking the convention over configuration style to the next level by registering the default configurations automatically based on the classpath libraries available at runtime. Well.. you might have already read this kind of introduction to SpringBoot on many blogs. So let me elaborate on what SpringBoot is and how it helps developing Spring applications more quickly. Spring framework was created by Rod Johnson when many of the Java developers are struggling with EJB 1.x/2.x for building enterprise applications. Spring framework makes developing the business components easy by using Dependency Injection and Aspect Oriented Programming concepts. Spring became very popular and many more Spring modules like SpringSecurity, Spring Batch, Spring Data etc become part of Spring portfolio. As more and more features added to Spring, configuring all the spring modules and their dependencies become a tedious task. Adding to that Spring provides atleast 3 ways of doing anything :-). Some people see it as flexibility and some others see it as confusing. Slowly, configuring all the Spring modules to work together became a big challenge. Spring team came up with many approaches to reduce the amount of configuration needed by introducing Spring XML DSLs, Annotations and JavaConfig. In the very beginning I remember configuring a big pile of jar version declarations in section and lot of declarations. Then I learned creating maven archetypes with basic structure and minimum required configurations. This reduced lot of repetitive work, but not eliminated completely. Whether you write the configuration by hand or generate by some automated ways, if there is code that you can see then you have to maintain it. So whether you use XML or Annotations or JavaConfig, you still need to configure(copy-paste) the same infrastructure setup one more time. On the other hand, J2EE (which is dead long time ago) emerged as JavaEE and since JavaEE6 it became easy (compared to J2EE and JavaEE5) to develop enterprise applications using JavaEE platform. Also JavaEE7 released with all the cool CDI, WebSockets, Batch, JSON support etc things became even more simple and powerful as well. With JavaEE you don't need so much XML configuration and your war file size will be in KBs (really??? for non-helloworld/non-stageshow apps also :-)). Naturally this "convention over configuration" and "you no need to glue APIs together appServer already did it" arguments became the main selling points for JavaEE over Spring. Then Spring team addresses this problem with SpringBoot :-). Now its time to JavaEE to show whats the SpringBoot's counterpart in JavaEE land :-) JBoss Forge?? I love this Spring vs JavaEE thing which leads to the birth of powerful tools which ultimately simplify the developers life :-). Many times we need similar kind of infrastructure setup using same libraries. For example, take a web application where you map DispatcherServlet url-pattern to "/", implement RESTFul webservices using Jackson JSON library with Spring Data JPA backend. Similarly there could be batch or spring integration applications which needs similar infrastructure configuration. SpringBoot to the rescue. SpringBoot look at the jar files available to the runtime classpath and register the beans for you with sensible defaults which can be overridden with explicit settings. Also SpringBoot configure those beans only when the jars files available and you haven't define any such type of bean. Altogether SpringBoot provides common infrastructure without requiring any explicit configuration but lets the developer overrides if needed. To make things more simpler, SpringBoot team provides many starter projects which are pre-configured with commonly used dependencies. For example Spring Data JPA starter project comes with JPA 2.x with Hibernate implementation along with Spring Data JPA infrastructure setup. Spring Web starter comes with Spring WebMVC, Embedded Tomcat, Jackson JSON, Logback setup. Aaah..enough theory..lets jump onto coding. I am using latest STS-3.5.1 IDE which provides many more starter project options like Facebbok, Twitter, Solr etc than its earlier version. Create a SpringBoot starter project by going to File -> New -> Spring Starter Project -> select Web and Actuator and provide the other required details and Finish. This will create a Spring Starter Web project with the following pom.xml and Application.java 4.0.0 com.sivalabs hello-springboot 1.0-SNAPSHOT jar hello-springboot Spring Boot Hello World org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-parent 1.1.3.RELEASE org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-actuator org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-web org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-test test UTF-8 com.sivalabs.springboot.Application 1.7 org.springframework.boot spring-boot-maven-plugin package com.sivalabs.springboot; import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration; import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; @Configuration @ComponentScan @EnableAutoConfiguration public class Application { public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args); } } Go ahead and run this class as a standalone Java class. It will start the embedded Tomcat server on 8080 port. But we haven't added any endpoints to access, lets go ahead and add a simple REST endpoint. @Configuration @ComponentScan @EnableAutoConfiguration @Controller public class Application { public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args); } @RequestMapping(value="/") @ResponseBody public String bootup() { return "SpringBoot is up and running"; } } Now point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and you should see the response "SpringBoot is up and running". Remember while creating project we have added Actuator starter module also. With Actuator you can obtain many interesting facts about your application. Try accessing the following URLs and you can see lot of runtime environment configurations that are provided by SpringBoot. http://localhost:8080/beans http://localhost:8080/metrics http://localhost:8080/trace http://localhost:8080/env http://localhost:8080/mappings http://localhost:8080/autoconfig http://localhost:8080/dump SpringBoot actuator deserves a dedicated blog post to cover its vast number of features, I will cover it in my upcoming posts. I hope this article provides some basic introduction to SpringBoot and how it simplifies the Spring application development. More on SpringBoot in upcoming articles. - See more at: http://www.sivalabs.in/2014/07/springboot-introducing-springboot.html#sthash.7syCIt8V.dpuf

In an earlier blog entry I had touched on a fictitious rube goldberg flow for capitalizing a string through a complicated series of steps, the premise of the article was to introduce Spring Integration Java DSL as an alternative to defining integration flows through xml configuration files. I learned a few new things after writing that blog entry, thanks to Artem Bilan and wanted to document those learnings here: So, first my original sample, here I have the following flow(the one's in bold): Take in a message of this type - "hello from spring integ" Split it up into individual words(hello, from, spring, integ) Send each word to a ActiveMQ queue Pick up the word fragments from the queue and capitalize each word Place the response back into a response queue Pick up the message, re-sequence based on the original sequence of the words Aggregate back into a sentence("HELLO FROM SPRING INTEG") and Return the sentence back to the calling application. EchoFlowOutbound.java: @Bean public DirectChannel sequenceChannel() { return new DirectChannel(); } @Bean public DirectChannel requestChannel() { return new DirectChannel(); } @Bean public IntegrationFlow toOutboundQueueFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from(requestChannel()) .split(s -> s.applySequence(true).get().getT2().setDelimiters("\\s")) .handle(jmsOutboundGateway()) .get(); } @Bean public IntegrationFlow flowOnReturnOfMessage() { return IntegrationFlows.from(sequenceChannel()) .resequence() .aggregate(aggregate -> aggregate.outputProcessor(g -> Joiner.on(" ").join(g.getMessages() .stream() .map(m -> (String) m.getPayload()).collect(toList()))) , null) .get(); } @Bean public JmsOutboundGateway jmsOutboundGateway() { JmsOutboundGateway jmsOutboundGateway = new JmsOutboundGateway(); jmsOutboundGateway.setConnectionFactory(this.connectionFactory); jmsOutboundGateway.setRequestDestinationName("amq.outbound"); jmsOutboundGateway.setReplyChannel(sequenceChannel()); return jmsOutboundGateway; } It turns out, based on Artem Bilan's feedback, that a few things can be optimized here. First notice how I have explicitly defined two direct channels, "requestChannel" for starting the flow that takes in the string message and the "sequenceChannel" to handle the message once it returns back from the jms message queue, these can actually be totally removed and the flow made a little more concise this way: @Bean public IntegrationFlow toOutboundQueueFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("requestChannel") .split(s -> s.applySequence(true).get().getT2().setDelimiters("\\s")) .handle(jmsOutboundGateway()) .resequence() .aggregate(aggregate -> aggregate.outputProcessor(g -> Joiner.on(" ").join(g.getMessages() .stream() .map(m -> (String) m.getPayload()).collect(toList()))) , null) .get(); } @Bean public JmsOutboundGateway jmsOutboundGateway() { JmsOutboundGateway jmsOutboundGateway = new JmsOutboundGateway(); jmsOutboundGateway.setConnectionFactory(this.connectionFactory); jmsOutboundGateway.setRequestDestinationName("amq.outbound"); return jmsOutboundGateway; } "requestChannel" is now being implicitly created just by declaring a name for it. The sequence channel is more interesting, quoting Artem Bilan - do not specify outputChannel for AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler and rely on DSL , what it means is that here jmsOutboundGateway is a AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler and its reply channel is implicitly derived by the DSL. Further, two methods which were earlier handling the flows for sending out the message to the queue and then continuing once the message is back, is collapsed into one. And IMHO it does read a little better because of this change. The second good change and the topic of this article is the introduction of the Jms namespace factories, when I had written the previous blog article, DSL had support for defining the AMQ inbound/outbound adapter/gateway, now there is support for Jms based inbound/adapter adapter/gateways also, this simplifies the flow even further, the flow now looks like this: @Bean public IntegrationFlow toOutboundQueueFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("requestChannel") .split(s -> s.applySequence(true).get().getT2().setDelimiters("\\s")) .handle(Jms.outboundGateway(connectionFactory) .requestDestination("amq.outbound")) .resequence() .aggregate(aggregate -> aggregate.outputProcessor(g -> Joiner.on(" ").join(g.getMessages() .stream() .map(m -> (String) m.getPayload()).collect(toList()))) , null) .get(); } The inbound Jms part of the flow also simplifies to the following: @Bean public IntegrationFlow inboundFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from(Jms.inboundGateway(connectionFactory) .destination("amq.outbound")) .transform((String s) -> s.toUpperCase()) .get(); } Thus, to conclude, Spring Integration Java DSL is an exciting new way to concisely configure Spring Integration flows. It is already very impressive in how it simplifies the readability of flows, the introduction of the Jms namespace factories takes it even further for JMS based flows.

The expected behaviour for volatile fields is that they should behave in a multi-threaded application the same as they do in a single threaded application. They are not forbidden to behave the same way, but they are not guaranteed to behave the same way. The solution in Java 5.0+ is to use AtomicXxxx classes however these are relatively inefficient in terms of memory (they add a header and padding), performance (they add a references and little control over their relative positions), and syntactically they are not as clear to use. IMHO A simple solution if for volatile fields to act as they might be expected to do, the way JVM must support in AtomicFields which is not forbidden in the current JMM (Java- Memory Model) but not guaranteed. Why make fields volatile? The benefit of volatile fields is that they are visible across threads and some optimisations which avoid re-reading them are disabled so you always check again the current value even if you didn't change them. e.g. without volatile Thread 2: int a = 5; Thread 1: a = 6; (later) Thread 2: System.out.println(a); // prints 5 With volatile Thread 2: volatile int a = 5; Thread 1: a = 6; (later) Thread 2: System.out.println(a); // prints 6 Why not use volatile all the time? Volatile read and write access is substantially slower. When you write to a volatile field it stalls the entire CPU pipeline to ensure the data has been written to cache. Without this, there is a risk the next read of the value sees an old value, even in the same thread (See AtomicLong.lazySet() which avoids stalling the pipeline) The penalty can be in the order of 10x slower which you don't want to be doing on every access. What are the limitations of volatile? A significant limitation is that operations on the field is not atomic, even when you might think it is. Even worse than that is that usually, there is no difference. I.e. it can appear to work for a long time even years and suddenly/randomly break due to an incidental change such as the version of Java used, or even where the object is loaded into memory. e.g. which programs you loaded before running the program. e.g. updating a value Thread 2: volatile int a = 5; Thread 1: a += 1; Thread 2: a += 2; (later) Thread 2: System.out.println(a); // prints 6, 7 or 8 This is an issue because the read of a and the write of a are done separately and you can get a race condition. 99%+ of the time it will behave as expect, but sometimes it won't/ What can you do about it? You need to use AtomicXxxx classes. These wrap volatile fields with operations which behave as expected. Thread 2: AtomicInteger a = new AtomicInteger(5); Thread 1: a.incrementAndGet(); Thread 2: a.addAndGet(2); (later) Thread 2: System.out.println(a); // prints 8 What do I propose? The JVM has a means to behave as expected, the only surprising thing is you need to use a special class to do what the JMM won't guarantee for you. What I propose is that the JMM be changed to support the behaviour currently provided by the concurrency AtomicClasses. In each case the single threaded behaviour is unchanged. A multi-threaded program which does not see a race condition will behave the same. The difference is that a multi-threaded program does not have to see a race condition but changing the underlying behaviour current method suggested syntax notes x.getAndIncrement() x++ or x += 1 x.incrementAndGet() ++x x.getAndDecrment() x-- or x -= 1 x.decrementAndGet() --x x.addAndGet(y) (x += y) x.getAndAdd(y) ((x += y)-y) x.compareAndSet(e, y) (x == e ? x = y, true : false) Need to add the comma syntax used in other languages. These operations could be supported for all the primitive types such as boolean, byte, short, int, long, float and double. Additional assignment operators could be supported such as current method suggested syntax notes Atomic multiplication x *= 2; Atomic subtraction x -= y; Atomic division x /= y; Atomic modulus x %= y; Atomic shift x <<= y; Atomic shift x >>= z; Atomic shift x >>>= w; Atomic and x &= ~y; clears bits Atomic or x |= z; sets bits Atomic xor x ^= w; flips bits What is the risk? This could break code which relies on these operations occasionally failing due to race conditions. It might not be possible to support more complex expressions in a thread safe manner. This could lead to surprising bugs as the code can look like the works, but it doesn't. Never the less it will be no worse than the current state. JEP 193 - Enhanced Volatiles There is a JEP 193 to add this functionality to Java. An example is; class Usage { volatile int count; int incrementCount() { return count.volatile.incrementAndGet(); } } IMHO there is a few limitations in this approach. The syntax is fairly significant change. Changing the JMM might not require many changes the the Java syntax and possibly no changes to the compiler. It is a less general solution. It can be useful to support operations like volume += quantity; where these are double types. It places more burden on the developer to understand why he/she should use this instead of x++; Conclusion Much of the syntactic and performance overhead of using AtomicInteger and AtomicLong could be removed if the JMM guaranteed the equivalent single threaded operations behaved as expected for multi-threaded code. This feature could be added to earlier versions of Java by using byte code instrumentation.

We have published the results of the Eclipse Community Survey 2014. Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey this year. The complete results and data are available for anyone to download [xls] [ods]. As in other years, I think the results provide an interesting perspective on what tools software developers are using and the type of applications they are building. Here are some key highlights from the results this year: 1) Git #1 Code Management Tool. Git has finally surpassed Subversion to be the top code management tool used by software developers. A third of developers (33.3%) report they use Git as their primary code management tool compared to 30.7% using Subversion. Subversion continues to show a downward trend from previous years when it was used by more than half the developers. Of note, 9.6% claim GitHub is their primary code management tool so the prevalence of overall Git usage is becoming dominate. 2) Maven and Jenkins Key Tools. For Build and Release tools, Maven and Jenkins continue to be key tools used by developers. Of interest is the growth of Gradle from 2013 (4.5%) to 2014 (11%). 3) Top 3 Application Servers. Tomcat (32.6%), JBoss (11.8%) and Jetty (7.2%) continue to be the top 3 application servers. 4) Java 8 Adoption. Java 8 was released in March 2014 and already 9.2% of Java developers have migrated to Java 8 as their primary version of Java. 59.2% are using Java 7 but close to a quarter are using Java 6 or before. 5) Majority of Developers Use JavaScript. More and more software developers use multiple languages to develop software. Due to the Eclipse biased of the survey, Java is not surprisingly the top primary language. However, when asked what other languages developers might use, JavaScript stands out to be a popular language with a the majority of developers (56.2%) claiming it as a secondary language. 6) Developers Experimenting With Open Hardware. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Open Hardware have become important industry trends in the last couple of years. Over a third (35.7%) of software developers are spending their own personal time learning about devices like the BeagleBone, Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey. I hope everyone finds the results of interest.

In this post we will see how we can write Javadoc comments using Markdown instead of the typical Javadoc syntax. So what is Markdown? Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax designed so that it optionally can be converted to HTML using a tool by the same name. Markdown is popularly used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums or in text editors for the quick creation of rich text documents. (Wikipedia: Markdown) Markdown is a very easy to read formatting syntax. Different variations of Markdown can be used on Stack Overflow or GitHub to format user generated content. Setup By default the Javadoc tool uses Javadoc comments to generate API documentation in HTML form. This process can be customized used Doclets. Doclets are Java programs that specify the content and format of the output of the Javadoc tool. The markdown-doclet is a replacement for the standard Java Doclet which gives developers the option to use Markdown syntax in their Javadoc comments. We can set up this doclet in Maven using the maven-javadoc-plugin. maven-javadoc-plugin 2.9 ch.raffael.doclets.pegdown.PegdownDoclet ch.raffael.pegdown-doclet pegdown-doclet 1.1 true Writing comments in Markdown Now we can use Markdown syntax in Javadoc comments: /** * ## Large headline * ### Smaller headline * * This is a comment that contains `code` parts. * * Code blocks: * * ```java * int foo = 42; * System.out.println(foo); * ``` * * Quote blocks: * * > This is a block quote * * lists: * * - first item * - second item * - third item * * This is a text that contains an [external link][link]. * * [link]: http://external-link.com/ * * @param id the user id * @return the user object with the passed `id` or `null` if no user with this `id` is found */ public User findUser(long id) { ... } After running mvn javadoc:javadoc we can find the generated HTML API documentation in target/site/apidocs. The generated documentation for the method shown above looks like this: As we can see the Javadoc comments get nicely converted to HTML. Conclusion Markdown has the clear advantage over standard Javadoc syntax that the source it is far easier to read. Just have a look at some of the method comments of java.util.Map. Many Javadoc comments are full with formatting tags and are barely readable without any tool. But be aware that Markdown can cause problems with tools and IDEs that expect standard Javadoc syntax.

Utilize this checklist to review the quality of your Java code, including security, performance, and static code analysis.

I recently saw Mike Wienser’s SpringOne2GX talk about Application Security Pitfalls. It is very informative and worth watching if you are using Spring’s stack on servlet container. It reminded me one serious Spring Security Misconfiguration I was facing once. Going to explain it on Spring’s Guide Project called Securing a Web Application. This project uses Spring Boot, Spring Integration and Spring MVC. Project uses these views: @Configuration public class MvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter { @Override public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) { registry.addViewController("/home").setViewName("home"); registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("home"); registry.addViewController("/hello").setViewName("hello"); registry.addViewController("/login").setViewName("login"); } } Where “/home”, “/” and “/login” URLs should be publicly accessible and “/hello” should be accessible only to authenticated user. Here is original Spring Security configuration from Guide: @Configuration @EnableWebMvcSecurity public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .authorizeRequests() .antMatchers("/", "/home").permitAll() .anyRequest().authenticated(); http .formLogin() .loginPage("/login") .permitAll() .and() .logout() .permitAll(); } @Override protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception { auth .inMemoryAuthentication() .withUser("user").password("password").roles("USER"); } } Nice and explanatory as all Spring’s Guides are. First “configure” method registers “/” and “home” as public and specifies that everything else should be authenticated. It also registers login URL. Second “configure” method specifies authentication method for role “USER”. Of course you don’t want to use it like this in production :). Now I am going to slightly amend this code. @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { //!!! Don't use this example !!! http .authorizeRequests() .antMatchers("/hello").hasRole("USER"); //... same as above ... } Everything is public and private endpoints have to be listed. You can see that my amended code have the same behavior as original. In fact it saved one line of code. But there is serious problem with this. What if my I need to introduce new private endpoint? Let’s say I am not aware of the fact that it needs to be registered in Spring Security configuration. My new endpoint would be public. Such misconfiguration is really hard to catch and can lead to unwanted exposure of URLs. So conclusion is: Always authenticate all endpoints by default.

The main concept behind functional programming is that data and behaviors can be treated and manipulated uniformly and in the same way. In practical terms this means that it is possible to pass to a method both values and functions and in the same way the method itself can return either a value or a function. With this regard a function accepting one or more functions as argument and/or returning another function as result is called an higher-order function. The purpose of this article is explaining what functions composition and currying are demonstrating why they can be both seen as special cases of higher-order functions and showing how to use them with a practical example in Java 8. Let's define a Converter as an object with a single method that takes as input a conversion rate and the value to be converted and returns the conversion's result that is obtained by simply multiplying these 2 arguments. Given this description the Converter can be seen as a function of 2 parameters and then defined as a particular implementation of the BiFunction interface taking 2 Doubles, the conversion rate and the value to be converted, as arguments and returning a third Double that is the converted value. public class Converter implements BiFunction { @Override public Double apply(Double conversionRate, Double value) { return conversionRate * value; } } In this way we could for instance convert 10, 20 or 50 miles in kilometers by instancing a new Converter and passing to it the conversion rate between miles and kilometers together with the number of miles to be converted. Converter converter = new Converter(); double tenMilesInKm = converter.apply(1.609, 10.0); double twentyMilesInKm = converter.apply(1.609, 20.0); double fiftyMilesInKm = converter.apply(1.609, 50.0); This works, but there is something not very practical with this approach: we are obliged to repeat the same conversion rate for all the invocation of our converter. It would be better if our converter could offer an easy way to obtain a specialized version of it just converting miles to kilometers. In other words we would like to create a Function out of the original BiFunction having set one of the 2 arguments of the BiFunction to a fixed value, that in our case is the miles/km conversion rate. In functional programming this particular operation is called currying. Currying Unfortunately the native Java 8 BiFunction interface doesn't provide currying out of the box. Nevertheless it is very easy to develop a custom extension of the original BiFunction interface having 2 additional default methods that allow to set one of the 2 arguments of the BiFunction to a fixed value. @FunctionalInterface public interface ExtendedBiFunction extends BiFunction { default Function curry1(T t) { return u -> apply(t, u); } default Function curry2(U u) { return t -> apply(t, u); } } The methods curry1 and curry2 fix respectively the first and the second argument of the BiFunction and return a Function having as single argument the one of the two that is still remained unfixed. If we now change our Converter just making it to implement this ExtendedBiFunction interface public class Converter implements ExtendedBiFunction it's possible to obtain a Function converting miles to kilometers fixing the first argument of the converter to the appropriate conversion rate. Function mi2kmConverter = converter.curry1(1.609); double tenMilesInKm = mi2kmConverter.apply(10.0); double twentyMilesInKm = mi2kmConverter.apply(20.0); double fiftyMilesInKm = mi2kmConverter.apply(50.0); Of course we can repeat this specialization process how many times we want for example to obtain a converter from ounces to grams. Function ou2grConverter = converter.curry1(28.345); double tenOuncesInGr = ou2grConverter.apply(10.0); double twentyOuncesInGr = ou2grConverter.apply(20.0); double fiftyOuncesInGr = ou2grConverter.apply(50.0); More formally currying is a technique where a function f of two arguments (x and y say) is seen instead as a function g of one argument which returns a function also of one argument. The value returned by the latter function is the same as the value of the original function. f(x,y) = (g(x))(y) Of course the same principle can be generalized to transform a function of n arguments in one of n-1 arguments having fixed the remaining one. It's also easy to see that the curry1 and curry2 methods are examples of higher-order function since they returns a Function as result. Function composition In the biggest part of cases a multiplication, as the one performed by our Converter class, is all you need to do to convert a unit measure into another. However there are some situations for which this couldn't be enough. For instance the formula to convert a Celsius temperature in a Farenheit one is: F = C * 9/5 + 32 After having multiplied the Celsius temperature by the 9/5 factor, you still have to add 32 in order to obtain the corresponding Farenheit value. Is there a way to obtain a Function converting Celsius to Farenheit degrees from our generic Converter? This is a case where functions composition can come to the rescue. In fact the native Java 8 Function interface already provides a default method named andThen accepting another Function as argument and returning a third Function as result (another higher-order function) that is the composition of the first 2. The resulting composed function first applies the original function to its input, and then applies the function passed as argument to the result. In this way the Celsius to Farenheit conversion function can be obtained currying the generic converter with the 9/5 factor and then applying a further function that increments the result of the first one of 32. Function celsius2farenheitConverter = converter.curry1(9.0/5).andThen(n -> n + 32); double tenCInF = celsius2farenheitConverter.apply(10.0); double twentyCInF = celsius2farenheitConverter.apply(20.0); double fiftyCInF = celsius2farenheitConverter.apply(50.0); What about the opposite conversion? We have to use the formula: C = (F - 32) * 5/9 meaning that this time the subtraction has to be performed before the multiplication by the conversion rate. In other words we need to compose the original conversion function with another function (the subtraction) that has to be applied before it and not after as we did above. The native Java 8 Function interface already provides a compose method allowing to achieve this, but for some reason the same method is not available also on the BiFunction interface. This is not too bad since we can add it (actually we need 2 of them, one for each argument) to our ExtendedBiFunction interface. @FunctionalInterface public interface ExtendedBiFunction extends BiFunction { default Function curry1(T t) { return u -> apply(t, u); } default Function curry2(U u) { return t -> apply(t, u); } default ExtendedBiFunction compose1(Function before) { return (v, u) -> apply(before.apply(v), u); } default ExtendedBiFunction compose2(Function before) { return (t, v) -> apply(t, before.apply(v)); } } Here the compose1 higher-order function composes the BiFuction with the before Function and returns another BiFunction that, when applied, first transform its first argument with the before Function and then applies the original BiFunction with the transformed first argument and the unchanged second one. The compose2 method implements exactly the same principle to the second argument of the BiFunction leaving unchanged the first one. We can now obtain the Farenheit to Celsius converter composing the generic Converter with a Function that subtract 32 from the value to be converted before before to currying the first argument fixing it to 5/9. Function farenheit2celsiusConverter = converter.compose2((Double n) -> n - 32).curry1(5.0/9); double tenFInC = farenheit2celsiusConverter.apply(10.0); double twentyFInC = farenheit2celsiusConverter.apply(20.0); double fiftyFInC = farenheit2celsiusConverter.apply(50.0); If you want you can both deepen your knowledge of the new API introduced into Java in its 8th major release and learn how to leverage the new functional features of the language reading the Java 8 in Action book that I just finished to write together with Raoul-Gabriel Urma and Alan Mycroft.