this is my collection of websites for advanced level java developers. these websites provide news, answers to popular questions, interview questions, science lectures, etc. quality is the key factor of good websites. in my opinion, they all have the highest quality. in the following, i will also share how i use these websites for learning or for fun. 1. stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com is probably the most popular website in the programming world. there are millions of good questions and answers. learning an api or a programming language often rely on code examples, stackoverflow has a lot of code segments. another good thing about stackoverflow is that it is social. you can view questions under some certain tags, e.g. “java” and “regex”, then you can see what question is most frequently asked and most voted. this can serve as a good resource for learning, also a good resource to write popular topics of java bloggers. url: http://stackoverflow.com/ 2. dzone.com i would say this website is fun, lots of developers share their blog articles. it is like an adventure, you never know what you are going to read next from this site. url: http://www.dzone.com 3. leetcode.com if interview question is java specific, like “what array look like in memory in java”, you can get answers from java websites. however, if the question is something like “how to convert an sorted array to a balanced tree”, then leetcode is the right place to go. it is a social platform for preparing it technical interviews and contains a collection of algorithm related questions. the best part is that it also has an online judge which can check if your code is correct or not by feeding different size of data. to be successful in a technical interview, they believe it is mainly repeating these three important steps: code → read → discuss. url: http://leetcode.com/ 4. java se technical documentation this website contains all documents you will need to use api of java se. even if you are an advanced level java developer, i’m pretty sure that you will find something useful and official here. for example, you can read some tutorials of “essential java classes”, “deployment”, etc. url: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/ 5. github you probably know that you can host your projects free there, but you may not know it is an excellent resource for learning java libraries and frameworks. for instance, if you want to learn spring mvc framework, you can search and find some open source projects. as the “monkey see monkey do” rule works for learning frameworks, you will be able to learn the frameworks quickly by examples, especially you are an experienced developers. url: https://github.com/ 6. coursera this is the best site for video lectures. you can find a lot of good computer science courses from famous professors of top schools. some of them are even the inventor of some computer science areas. url: https://www.coursera.org/ 7. java world this site contains a large collection of java tutorials on various kinds of topics. a lot of articles are well written and has pictures/diagram for illustrations. it can be used as a book for deep learning. url: http://www.javaworld.com/ 8. ibm developerworks it has a lot of nice articles wrtten by ibm people. url: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/ 9. wikipedia this is one of the best resources for looking up and learning almost any concepts. for example, as an experienced java developer you may just want to know some concept, but not learn much. this is a great place to find updated information for free. for example, what is service-oriented programming . url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 10. program creek comparing with the above 9 websites, the size of programcreek.com is much smaller. but the good thing about it is that it is a well-written site that can provide some fun to read. you can find some topics that haven’t been written by any other websites, and each of the articles always contains nice diagram or code examples. it contains articles written by people from different areas (research, industry) and it is always updated and share all good-quality stuff for java developers. url: http://www.programcreek.com/

In Groovy we can check if a String value only contains whitespaces with the isAllWhitespace() method. The method checks for spaces, but also takes into account tab and newline characters as whitespace. assert ''.allWhitespace assert ' '.allWhitespace assert '\t '.allWhitespace assert ' \r\n '.allWhitespace assert !'mrhaki'.allWhitespace

We can use the collectReplacements(Closure) method to replace characters in a String. We pass a closure to the method and the closure is invoked for each character in the String value. If we return null the character is not transformed, otherwise we can return the replacement character. def s = 'Gr00vy is gr8' def replacement = { // Change 8 to eat if (it == '8') { 'eat' // Change 0 to o } else if (it == '0') { 'o' // Do not transform } else { null } } assert s.collectReplacements(replacement) == 'Groovy is great'Code written with Groovy 2.1.6

Java is a very popular programming language. Here are the top 10 books for advanced Java developers.

If you are working as a middleware administrator or application support individual, you may have realized by now how crucial it is to have proper knowledge of the JVM along with a good understanding of the Java concurrency principles (yes you have to learn how to analyze thread dumps). There is one principle I’m sure about: it is never too late to improve our knowledge and troubleshooting skills. Reaching a skill “plateau” is quite common and typically not due to our ability to learn but because of our fear and lack of willingness to embrace the challenges. One of such challenges is possibly your ability to understand and assess the health of the JVM & middleware threads of the Java EE container you are responsible for such as Oracle Weblogic Server. If this is your situation then this post is for you. Question: How can you monitor the JVM threads in an efficient manner using the Weblogic admin console? Also, please elaborate how you can differentiate between healthy threads vs. slow running threads. Finally, what other tools can help you achieve this task? Answer: Please note that Weblogic Server 10.3.5 was used for the following example. Oracle Weblogic Server is always installed with an admin console that provides you with out-of-the-box monitoring functions of the various Java EE resources exposed via the JMX API. Weblogic threads (created and assigned by the WLS kernel to the default self-tuning thread pool) are also fully exposed. This monitoring page allows you to: Monitor the full list of all Java threads under Weblogic control. Correlate any slow running thread with your application, request and assigned Work Manager, if any. Generate a JVM Thread Dump of the Weblogic managed server directly from the page via the Dump Thread Stacks button. Thread states - summary view This section provides a summary of all different Weblogic threads and states. Thread states - detailed view The detailed view is much more interesting. This is where you will be spending most of your analysis time. Make sure that you add all proper columns including the associated Work Manager, application name etc. The live Weblogic thread monitoring analysis process I usually follow is as per below. This approach is very useful for production environments when you are trying to determine the source of a performance slowdown or just to give you an idea of the health of the Weblogic threads. Refresh the page every 3-5 seconds. In between the refresh actions, identify the threads that are still executing the same request (slow running threads). This can be determined if you see the same Weblogic thread “Name” executing the same “Current Request” with the same “Total requests” value. Other criteria’s would be if Weblogic “promote” the affected thread(s) to Hogger or STUCK. Continue until you are done with your monitoring activity. As soon as one or a few slow running threads are found, identify the affected request(s) and application(s). Immediately after, generate a JVM Thread Dump using the Dump Thread Stacks button and copy/paste the output to a text editor for live or future analysis. I also recommend that you use other tools to monitor the JVM and threads such as JVisualVM. JVisualVM will give a full view of all the threads, including GC related threads. It will also allow you to monitor the Java heap and correlate any finding with the health of the activity of the garbage collector. Finally, if you suspect that you are dealing with a deeper thread concurrency problem such as thread lock contention or Java-level deadlock, you will need to generate a native thread dump (JVisualVM, kill -3 PID, jstack etc.) which will allow you to review the different monitor locks and locked ownable synchronizers.

Our problem began when we tried to read a certain cell that contained the value 929 as a numeric field and store it into an integer.

inner interface is also called nested interface, which means declare an interface inside of another interface. for example, the entry interface is declared in the map interface. public interface map { interface entry{ int getkey(); } void clear(); } why use inner interface? there are several compelling reasons for using inner interface: it is a way of logically grouping interfaces that are only used in one place. it increases encapsulation. nested interfaces can lead to more readable and maintainable code. one example of inner interface used in java standard library is java.util.map and java.util.map.entry. here java.util.map is used also as a namespace. entry does not belong to the global scope, which means there are many other entities that are entries and are not necessary map’s entries. this indicates that entry represents entries related to the map. how inner interface works? to figure out how inner interface works, we can compare it with nested classes. nested classes can be considered as a regular method declared in outer class. since a method can be declared as static or non-static, similarly nested classes can be static and non-static. static class is like a static method, it can only access outer class members through objects. non-static class can access any member of the outer class. because an interface can not be instantiated, the inner interface only makes sense if it is static. therefore, by default inter interface is static, no matter you manually add static or not. a simple example of inner interface? map.java public interface map { interface entry{ int getkey(); } void clear(); } mapimpl.java public class mapimpl implements map { class implentry implements map.entry{ public int getkey() { return 0; } } @override public void clear() { //clear } }

in this article i’ll introduce the basic coding that require to create jquery datatable using json passed by simple servlet. datatable is very powerful jquery based grid with advance features which can be build in short span of time with customize features. installation 1. download latest jquery datatable download 2. above download will provide two jquery plugin jquery.js and querytables.js 3. default stylesheet which shipped with latest datatable download package note: you can download full source code from github link creating the datatable we can write below code to create the basic datatable with data feedsummary.jsp ========================== $(document).ready will ready to execute the javascript and var otable = $(‘#tableid’).datatable says that write datatable on tableid place. datatables will adding sorting, filtering, paging and information to your table by default, providing the end user of your web-site with the ability to control the display of the table and find the information that they want from it as quickly as possible. the pointer tableid and column name will be defined in table tag as below feedsummary.jsp ===================== first namelast nameaddress 1address 2 above datatable code invoke feedservlet which will return json string as defined below feedservlet.java =============== protected void dopost(httpservletrequest request, httpservletresponse response) throws servletexception, ioexception { printwriter out = response.getwriter(); string json = "{ \"demo\":[[\"first name\",\"last name\","+ +\"address1\",\"address2\"],[\"first name\",\"last name\",\"address1\",\"address2\"]]}"; out.println(json); } now either we can use servlet annotation or web.xml as below to register above feedservlet web.xml ========= feedservlet feedservlet feedservlet feedservlet /feedservlet running incorporate the above point and deploy with server to view the result as follows: http://localhost:8080/exampledatatablejson/feedsummary.jsp jquery datatable image conclusion you can download full source code from github link and most welcome to fork or update the same. references: http://datatables.net/examples/

This post was originally authored by Rob Winch from SpringSource. This is my last post in a two part series on Spring Security 3.2.0.RC1. My previous post discussed Spring Security's CSRF protection. In this post we will discuss how to use Spring Security to add various response headers to help secure your application. SECURITY HEADERS Many of the new Spring Security features in 3.2.0.RC1 are implemented by adding headers to the response. The foundation for these features came from hard work from Marten Deinum. If the name sounds familiar, it may because one of his 10K+ posts on the Spring Forums has helped you out. If you are using XML configuration, you can add all of the default headers using Spring Security's element with no child elements to add all the default headers to the response: ... If you are using Spring Security's Java configuration, all of the default security headers are added by default. They can be disabled using the Java configuration below: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers().disable() ...; } } The remainder of this post will discuss each of the default headers in more detail: Cache Control Content Type Options HTTP Strict Transport Security X-Frame-Options X-XSS-PROTECTION Cache Control In the past Spring Security required you to provide your own cache control for your web application. This seemed reasonable at the time, but browser caches have evolved to include caches for secure connections as well. This means that a user may view an authenticated page, log out, and then a malicious user can use the browser history to view the cached page. To help mitigate this Spring Security has added cache control support which will insert the following headers into you response. Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate Pragma: no-cache Simply adding the element with no child elements will automatically add Cache Control and quite a few other protections. However, if you only want cache control, you can enable this feature using Spring Security's XML namespace with the element. ... Similarly, you can enable only cache control within Java Configuration with the following: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers() .cacheControl() .and() ...; } } If you actually want to cache specific responses, your application can selectively invokeHttpServletResponse.setHeader(String,String) to override the header set by Spring Security. This is useful to ensure things like CSS, JavaScript, and images are properly cached. When using Spring Web MVC, this is typically done within your configuration. For example, the following configuration will ensure that the cache headers are set for all of your resources: @EnableWebMvc public class WebMvcConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter { @Override public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) { registry .addResourceHandler("/resources/**") .addResourceLocations("/resources/") .setCachePeriod(31556926); } // ... } Content Type Options Uploading Files There are many additional things one should do (i.e. only display the document in a distinct domain, ensure Content-Type header is set, sanitize the document, etc) when allowing content to be uploaded. However, these measures are out of the scope of what Spring Security provides. It is also important to point out when disabling content sniffing, you must specify the content type in order for things to work properly. Historically browsers, including Internet Explorer, would try to guess the content type of a request using content sniffing. This allowed browsers to improve the user experience by guessing the content type on resources that had not specified the content type. For example, if a browser encountered a JavaScript file that did not have the content type specified, it would be able to guess the content type and then execute it. The problem with content sniffing is that this allowed malicious users to use polyglots (i.e. a file that is valid as multiple content types) to execute XSS attacks. For example, some sites may allow users to submit a valid postscript document to a website and view it. A malicious user might create a postscript document that is also a valid JavaScript file and execute a XSS attack with it. Content sniffing can be disabled by adding the following header to our response: X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff Just as with the cache control element, the nosniff directive is added by default when using the element with no child elements. However, if you want more control over which headers are added you can use the element as shown below: ... The X-Content-Type-Options header is added by default with Spring Security Java configuration. If you want more control over the headers, you can explicitly specify the content type options with the following: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers() .contentTypeOptions() .and() ...; } } HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) When you type in your bank's website, do you enter mybank.example.com or do you enter https://mybank.example.com? If you omit the https protocol, you are potentially vulnerable toMan in the Middle attacks. Even if the website performs a redirect to https://mybank.example.com a malicious user could intercept the initial HTTP request and manipulate the response (i.e. redirect to https://mibank.example.com and steal their credentials). Many users omit the https protocol and this is why HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)was created. Once mybank.example.com is added as a HSTS host, a browser can know ahead of time that any request to mybank.example.com should be interpreted as https://mybank.example.com. This greatly reduces the possibility of a Man in the Middle attack occurring. HSTS Notes In accordance with RFC6797, the HSTS header is only injected into HTTPS responses. In order for the browser to acknowledge the header, the browser must first trust the CA that signed the SSL certificate used to make the connection (not just the SSL certificate). One way for a site to be marked as a HSTS host is to have the host preloaded into the browser. Another is to add the "Strict-Transport-Security" header to the response. For example the following would instruct the browser to treat the domain as an HSTS host for a year (there are approximately 31536000 seconds in a year): Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000 ; includeSubDomains The optional includeSubDomains directive instructs Spring Security that subdomains (i.e. secure.mybank.example.com) should also be treated as an HSTS domain. As with the other headers, Spring Security adds the previous header to the response when the element is specified with no child elements. It is also automatically added when you are using Java Configuration. You can also only use HSTS headers with the element as shown below: ... Similarly, you can enable only HSTS headers with Java Configuration: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers() .hsts() .and() ...; } } X-Frame-Options Content Security Policy Another modern approach to dealing with clickjacking is using a Content Security Policy. Spring Security does not provide support for this as the specification is not released and it is quite a bit more complicated. To stay up to date with this issue and to see how you can implement it with Spring Security refer to SEC-2117 Allowing your website to be added to a frame can be a security issue. For example, using clever CSS styling users could be tricked into clicking on something that they were not intending (video demo). For example, a user that is logged into their bank might click a button that grants access to other users. This sort of attack is known asClickjacking. There are a number ways to mitigate clickjacking attacks. For example, to protect legacy browsers from clickjacking attacks you can use frame breaking code. While not perfect, the frame breaking code is the best you can do for the legacy browsers. A more modern approach to address clickjacking is to use X-Frame-Options header: X-Frame-Options: DENY The X-Frame-Options response header instructs the browser to prevent any site with this header in the response from being rendered within a frame. As with the other response headers, this is automatically included when the element is specified with no child elements. You can also explicitly specify the element to control which headers are added to the response. ... Similarly, you can enable only frame options within Java Configuration with the following: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers() .frameOptions() .and() ...; } } X-XSS-Protection Some browsers have built in support for filtering out reflected XSS attacks. This is by no means full proof, but does assist in XSS protection. The filtering is typically enabled by default, so adding the header typically just ensures it is enabled and instructs the browser what to do when a XSS attack is detected. For example, the filter might try to change the content in the least invasive way to still render everything. At times, this type of replacement can become a XSS vulnerability in itself. Instead, it is best to block the content rather than attempt to fix it. To do this we can add the following header: X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block This header is included by default when the element is specified with no child elements. We can explicitly state it using the element as shown below: ... Similarly, you can enable only xss protection within Java Configuration with the following: @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .headers() .xssProtection() .and() ...; } } FEEDBACK PLEASE If you encounter a bug, have an idea for improvement, etc please do not hesitate to bring it up! We want to hear your thoughts so we can ensure we get it right before the code is generally available. Trying out new features early is a good and simple way to give back to the community. This also ensures that the features you want are present and working as you think they should. Please log any issues or feature requests to the Spring Security JIRA. After logging a JIRA, we encourage (but do not require) you to submit your changes in a pull request. You can read more about how to do this in the Contributor Guidelines If you have questions on how to do something, please use the Spring Security forums orStack Overflow with the tag spring-security (I will be monitoring them closely). If you have specific comments questions about this blog, feel free to leave a comment. Using the appropriate tools will help make it easier for everyone. CONCLUSION You should have a good understanding of the new features present in Spring Security 3.2.RC1.

There are many good benefits in using slf4j library as your Java application logging API layer. Here I will show few examples on how to use and configure it.

In a previous article about how you can remove whitesapce from a string, I spoke about using the functions ltrim() and rtrim(). These work by passing in a string to remove whitespace. Using the ltrim() function will remove the whitespace from the start of the string, using the rtrim() function will remove the whitespace from the end of the string. But you can also use these functions to remove characters from a string. These functions take a second parameter that allows you to specify what characters to remove. // This will search for the word start at the beginning of the string and remove it ltrim($string, 'start'); // This will search for the word end at the end of the string and remove it rtrim($string, 'end'); Remove Trailing Slashes From a String A common use for this functionality is to remove the trailing slash from a URL. Below is a code snippet that allows you to easily do this using the rtrim() function. function remove_trailing_slashes( $url ) { return rtrim($url, '/'); } A common use for the ltrim() function is to remove the "http://" from a URL. Use the function below to remove both "http" and "https" from a URL: function remove_http( $url ) { $url = ltrim($url, 'http://'); $url = ltrim($url, 'https://'); return $url; }

java.util.Optional in Java 8 is a poor cousin of scala.Option[T] and Data.Maybe in Haskell. But this doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

I was facing a problem where while a person logs out his session is invalidated but the JSESSIONID still remained in the browser. As a result while logging in the Java API used to get the request from the browser along with a JSESSIONID(Just the ID since the session was invalidated) and would create the new session with the same ID. To fix this problem I used the above code so that whenever a user logs out the entire JSESSIONID becomes empty and thus cookie wont exist for that site.Anyone using JAVA can utilize this in their code. @RequestMapping(value = "/logout", method = RequestMethod.POST) public void logout(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) { /* Getting session and then invalidating it */ HttpSession session = request.getSession(false); if (request.isRequestedSessionIdValid() && session != null) { session.invalidate(); } handleLogOutResponse(response); } /** * This method would edit the cookie information and make JSESSIONID empty * while responding to logout. This would further help in order to. This would help * to avoid same cookie ID each time a person logs in * @param response */ private void handleLogOutResponse(HttpServletResponse response) { Cookie[] cookies = request.getCookies(); for (Cookie cookie : cookies) { cookie.setMaxAge(0); cookie.setValue(null); cookie.setPath("/"); response.addCookie(cookie); } }

In my last post, we saw how to use ASP.NET SignalR and AngularJS together using a "Hello World" type of example. Now that we have some idea of how to use both technologies together, we will take a look at a more advanced scenario in order to make the frameworks work better together. I assume that you have already seen the SignalR Stock ticker sample. If not, download it from GitHub or add the NuGet Package to an existing ASP.NET web application. Make sure that you take some time to run the sample at least once on multiple browsers and have a glance at the code before you proceed any further. I hope you had a look at the code on both the server and the client side of the stock ticker sample. We will not make any modification to the server code and the layout of the page, but we will rewrite the JavaScript part using features of AngularJS. Since there is a lot of client-side code to convert, let’s do it in a two-part series: Creating a custom service to communicate with the hub on the server and using the service in a controller (this post) Performing UI changes on the page, like enabling/disabling buttons, scrolling stock values in a list, and adding animation effect to values in a table and list (next post) Make a copy of the StockTicker.html file and give it a name of your choice. Add two JavaScript files, controller.js and factory.js, to the project. We will add script to these files soon. Modify the script reference section of the page to include the following script files: Let’s start implementing the SignalR part inside a custom service. To keep the controller free from doing anything other than providing data to the view and handling view events, we are creating a custom service to handle the hub communication logic. The service is responsible for: Creating objects needed for communication Configuring client functions to proxy and to respond when a market is opened, closed, or reset, or when a stock value is updated Starting a hub connection Getting the current values of stocks and the current market statuses of the stocks once the connection is started Opening, closing or resetting markets on demand Following is the module and the factory that handles the functionality mentioned above: var app = angular.module('app', []); app.value('$', $); app.factory('stockTickerData', ['$', '$rootScope', function ($, $rootScope) { function stockTickerOperations() { //Objects needed for SignalR var connection; var proxy; //To set values to fields in the controller var setMarketState; var setValues; var updateStocks; //This function will be called by controller to set callback functions var setCallbacks = function (setMarketStateCallback, setValuesCallback, updateStocksCallback) { setMarketState = setMarketStateCallback; setValues = setValuesCallback; updateStocks = updateStocksCallback; }; var initializeClient = function () { //Creating connection and proxy objects connection = $.hubConnection(); proxy = connection.createHubProxy('stockTicker'); configureProxyClientFunctions(); start(); }; var configureProxyClientFunctions = function () { proxy.on('marketOpened', function () { //set market state as open $rootScope.$apply(setMarketState(true)); }); proxy.on('marketClosed', function () { //set market state as closed $rootScope.$apply(setMarketState(false)); }); proxy.on('marketReset', function () { //Reset stock values initializeStockMarket(); }); proxy.on('updateStockPrice', function (stock) { $rootScope.$apply(updateStocks(stock)); }); }; var initializeStockMarket = function () { //Getting values of stocks from the hub and setting it to controllers field proxy.invoke('getAllStocks').done(function (data) { $rootScope.$apply(setValues(data)); }).pipe(function () { //Setting market state to field in controller based on the current state proxy.invoke('getMarketState').done(function (state) { if (state == 'Open') $rootScope.$apply(setMarketState(true)); else $rootScope.$apply(setMarketState(false)); }); }); }; var start = function () { //Starting the connection and initializing market connection.start().pipe(function () { initializeStockMarket(); }); }; var openMarket = function () { proxy.invoke('openMarket'); }; var closeMarket = function () { proxy.invoke('closeMarket'); }; var reset = function () { proxy.invoke('reset'); }; return { initializeClient: initializeClient, openMarket: openMarket, closeMarket: closeMarket, reset: reset, setCallbacks: setCallbacks } }; return stockTickerOperations; } ]); We need a controller to start the work. The controller will have the following components: An array to store the current stock values and a Boolean value to store the current market state Setters to assign values to the fields A function to modify the value of an entry in the stocks array Functions to handle open, close and reset operations when the corresponding button is clicked Set callbacks to the service and ask the service to kick off the communication Following is the code in the controller: var StockTickerCtrl = function ($scope, stockTickerData) { $scope.stocks = []; $scope.marketIsOpen = false; $scope.openMarket = function () { ops.openMarket(); } $scope.closeMarket = function () { ops.closeMarket(); } $scope.reset = function () { ops.reset(); } function assignStocks(stocks) { $scope.stocks = stocks; } function replaceStock(stock) { for (var count = 0; count < $scope.stocks.length; count++) { if ($scope.stocks[count].Symbol == stock.Symbol) { $scope.stocks[count] = stock; } } } function setMarketState(isOpen) { $scope.marketIsOpen = isOpen; } var ops = stockTickerData(); ops.setCallbacks(setMarketState, assignStocks, replaceStock); ops.initializeClient(); } The layout of the HTML page will remain unchanged. But we need to change the way data is rendered on the screen. The stock ticker sample uses a poor man’s template technique to render content in the table and in the scrolling list. Since we are using AngularJS, let’s replace it with expressions. Following is the mark-up on the page in Angular’s style: ASP.NET SignalR Stock Ticker Sample Live Stock Table SymbolPriceOpenHighLowChange% loading... {{stock.Symbol} {{stock.Price | number:2} {{stock.DayOpen | number:2} {{stock.DayHigh | number:2} {{stock.DayLow | number:2} {{stock.Change} {{stock.PercentChange} Live Stock Ticker loading... {{stock.Symbol} {{stock.Price | number:2}{{stock.Change} ({{stock.PercentChange}) Open this page on a browser and the original stock ticker page on another browser window and play with the buttons. You will see that both screens have the same data at any given point in time. The only difference would be the state of the buttons, their color and a scrolling list. We will fix them in the next post. Happy coding!

It’s no news that quicksort is considered one of the most important algorithms of the century and that it is the de facto system sort for many languages, including the Arrays.sort in Java. So, what’s new about quicksort? Well, nothing except that I just now figured out (two damn years after the release of Java 7) that the quicksort implementation of Arrays.sort has been replaced with a variant called dual-pivot quicksort. This thread is not only awesome for this reason but also how humble Jon Bentley and Joshua Bloch really are. What did I do then? Just like everybody else, I wanted to implement it and do some benchmarking against some 10 million integers (random and duplicate). Oddly enough, I found the following results: Random Data Basic quicksort: 1222 ms Three-way quicksort: 1295 ms (seriously!) Dual-pivot quicksort: 1066 ms Duplicate Data Basic quicksort: 378 ms Three-way quicksort: 15 ms Dual-pivot quicksort: six ms Stupid Question One I am afraid that I am missing something in the implementation of the three-way partition. Across several runs against random inputs (of 10 million numbers), I could see that the single pivot always performs better (although the difference is less than 100 milliseconds for 10 million numbers). I understand that the whole purpose of making the three-way quicksort the default quicksort until now is that it does not give 0(n2) performance on duplicate keys, which is very evident when I run it against duplicate inputs. But is it true that, for the sake of handling duplicate data, a small penalty is taken by the three-way quicksort? Or is my implementation bad? Stupid Question Two My dual-pivot implementation (link below) does not handle duplicates well. It takes forever (0(n2)) to execute. Is there a good way to avoid this? Referring to the Arrays.sort implementation, I figured out that ascending sequences and duplicates are eliminated well before the actual sorting is done. So, as a dirty fix, if the pivots are equal I fast-forward the lowerIndex until it is different than pivot2. Is this a fair implementation? else if (pivot1==pivot2){ while (pivot1==pivot2 && lowIndex=j) break; exchange(input, i, j); } exchange(input, pivotIndex, j); return j; } } Three-way package basics.sorting.quick; import static basics.shuffle.KnuthShuffle.shuffle; import static basics.sorting.utils.SortUtils.exchange; import static basics.sorting.utils.SortUtils.less; public class QuickSort3Way { public void sort (int[] input){ //input=shuffle(input); sort (input, 0, input.length-1); } public void sort(int[] input, int lowIndex, int highIndex) { if (highIndex<=lowIndex) return; int lt=lowIndex; int gt=highIndex; int i=lowIndex+1; int pivotIndex=lowIndex; int pivotValue=input[pivotIndex]; while (i<=gt){ if (less(input[i],pivotValue)){ exchange(input, i++, lt++); } else if (less (pivotValue, input[i])){ exchange(input, i, gt--); } else{ i++; } } sort (input, lowIndex, lt-1); sort (input, gt+1, highIndex); } } Dual-pivot package basics.sorting.quick; import static basics.shuffle.KnuthShuffle.shuffle; import static basics.sorting.utils.SortUtils.exchange; import static basics.sorting.utils.SortUtils.less; public class QuickSortDualPivot { public void sort (int[] input){ //input=shuffle(input); sort (input, 0, input.length-1); } private void sort(int[] input, int lowIndex, int highIndex) { if (highIndex<=lowIndex) return; int pivot1=input[lowIndex]; int pivot2=input[highIndex]; if (pivot1>pivot2){ exchange(input, lowIndex, highIndex); pivot1=input[lowIndex]; pivot2=input[highIndex]; //sort(input, lowIndex, highIndex); } else if (pivot1==pivot2){ while (pivot1==pivot2 && lowIndex

The above skyline is from "City," a simple flight-simulator by Ricardo "Mr. Doob" Cabello. "City" is a demo of the capabilities of WebGL, and is written in an impressive 100 lines of JavaScript using Three.js. In his blog post "How to Do a Procedural City in 100 Lines," Jerome Etienne walks you through the process of recreating Cabello's "City." The secret lies in creating 20,000 cubes that are given random sizes and positions and merging them together to create a city. Let's hope that this algorithm is never used for actual city-planning, though, because the buildings can randomly intersect each other and there are no logical spaces for streets! Check out Etienne's blog post here and watch the screencast introduction here:

Imagine that you need to find out how your actors are performing, but without using the Typesafe Console. (You don’t actually want to use this code in production, but it is an interesting project to learn.) What we are interested in is intercepting the receiveMessage call of the ActorCell class. A Short Introduction to AOP We could roll our own build of Akka, but that is not a good idea. Instead, we would like to somehow modify the bytecode of the existing Akka JARs to include our instrumentation code. It turns out that we can use aspect oriented programming to implement cross-cutting concerns in our code. Cross-cutting concerns are pieces of code that cut across the object hierarchy; in other words, we inject the same functionality to different levels of our class structure. In OOP, the only way to share functionality is with inheritance. I will explain the simplest case here, but the same rules apply to mix-in inheritance. If I have: class A { def foo: Int = 42 } class B { def bar: Int = 42 } class AA extends A class BB extends B Then the only way to share the implementation of foo is to extend A; the only way to share the implementation of bar is to extend B. Suppose we now want to measure how many times we call foo on all subtypes of A and bar, but only in subtypes of BB. This now turns out to be rather clumsy. Even if all we do is println("Executing foo") or println("Executing bar"), we have a lot of duplication on our hands. Instead, we would like to write something like this: before executing A.foo { println("Executing foo") } before executing BB.bar { println("Executing bar") } And have some machinery apply this to the classes that make up our system. Importantly, we would like this logic to be applied to every subtype of A and every subtype of BB, even if we only have their compiled forms in a JAR. Enter AspectJ And this is exactly what AspectJ does. It allows us to define these cross-cutting concerns and to weave them into our classes. The weaving can be done at compile time, or even at class load time. In other words, the AspectJ weaver can modify the classes with our cross-cutting concerns as the JVM loads them. The technical details now involve translating our before executing pseudo-syntax into the syntax that AspectJ can use. We are going to be particularly lazy and use AspectJ’s Java syntax. package monitor; import org.aspectj.lang.JoinPoint; import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect; import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Before; import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Pointcut; import javax.management.InstanceAlreadyExistsException; import javax.management.MBeanRegistrationException; import javax.management.MalformedObjectNameException; import javax.management.NotCompliantMBeanException; @Aspect public class MonitorAspect { @Pointcut( value = "execution (* akka.actor.ActorCell.receiveMessage(..))" + "&& args(msg)", argNames = "msg") public void receiveMessagePointcut(Object msg) {} @Before(value = "receiveMessagePointcut(msg)", argNames = "jp,msg") public void message(JoinPoint jp, Object msg) { // log the message System.out.println("Message " + msg); } } The annotations come from the AspectJ dependencies, which, in SBT syntax are just: "org.aspectj" % "aspectjweaver" % "1.7.2", "org.aspectj" % "aspectjrt" % "1.7.2" Excellent. We have defined a pointcut, which you can imagine as a target in the structure of our system. In this particular case, the pointcut says on execution of the receiveMessage method in akka.actor...ActorCell class, with any parameters of any type (..), returning any type * as long as the argument is called msg and inferred to be of the type Object. Without an advice though, a pointcut would be useless–just like having a method that is never called. An advice applies our logic at the point identified by the pointcut. Here, we have the message advice, which runs on execution of the methods matched by the receiveMssagePointcut. At the moment, it does nothing of importance. To see this in action, we need to tell the JVM to use the AspectJ weaver. We do so by specifying the Java agent, which registers a Java Instrumentation implementation, which performs the class file transformation. However, this transformation is costly. Imagine if we had to re-compile every class as it is loaded. To restrict the scope of the transformations, the AspectJ load-time weaver loads an XML file (boo, hiss, I know) from META-INF/aop.xml, which includes its settings. Now, to get it all running all you need to do is include javaagent:~/path-to/aspectjweaver.jar when we start the JVM. Measuring Now that we have our monitor.MonitoringAspect and META-INF/aop.xml ready, all we need to do is implement the logic that records the messages and prints out their per-second averages. I will leave it to the curious reader to come up with a much better approach, but here is one that works, albeit in a very naive way: package monitor; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Map; class ActorSystemMessages { private final Map messages = new HashMap<>(); void recordMessage() { long second = System.currentTimeMillis() / 1000; int count = 0; if (messages.containsKey(second)) { count = messages.get(second); } messages.put(second, ++count); } float average() { if (messages.isEmpty()) return 0; int total = 0; for (Integer i : messages.values()) { total += i; } return total / messages.size(); } } We can now use it in our MonitorAspect: @Aspect public class MonitorAspect { private ActorSystemMessages asm = new ActorSystemMessages(); @Pointcut( value = "execution (* akka.actor.ActorCell.receiveMessage(..)) " + "&& args(msg)", argNames = "msg") public void receiveMessagePointcut(Object msg) {} @Before(value = "receiveMessagePointcut(msg)", argNames = "jp,msg") public void message(JoinPoint jp, Object msg) { asm.recordMessage(); System.out.println("Average throughput " + asm.average()); } } Bringing in an Actor Let's see it all run. We will make a simple actor. This time, we will use the Actor DSL. We are not interested that much in its behavior, but we want to see messages being sent around. So, we construct a simple App subclass with two actors. One that sends the messages around and one that prints any message it receives. import akka.actor.{ActorRef, ActorSystem} object Main extends App { import akka.actor.ActorDSL._ import Commands._ implicit val system = ActorSystem() val chatter = actor(new Act { become { case i: Int => self ! (sender, i) case (sender: ActorRef, i: Int) => if (i > 0) self ! (sender, i - 1) else sender ! "zero" } }) implicit val _ = actor(new Act { become { case x => println(">>> " + x) } }) def commandLoop(): Unit = { readLine() match { case CountdownCommand(count) => chatter ! count.toInt case QuitCommand => return } commandLoop() } commandLoop() system.shutdown() } object Commands { val CountdownCommand = """(\d+)""".r val QuitCommand = "quit" } The chatter actor, as you can see, receives the number of messages to be crunched. It then sends a message to itself as a tuple containing the original sender and the number of messages, which will continue to decrease until we hit 0, when we send the "zero"String back to the original sender. As an interesting aside, we have the tail-recursive commandLoop() function that deals with the input that the users type in. Running the Example If you run the example without specifying the -javaagent JVM parameter, the aspect will not be weaved in; consequently, no bytecode will be modified and our logging will not work. Because your IDEs are different, the only reliable way is to run it in SBT. And so, execute sbt run, enter the number of messages and see them displayed. Note that I’m setting the javaOptions, fork and connectInput. The javaOptions is obvious since that’s how I specify the -javaagent parameter and fork makes SBT fork the java process so that the javaOptions takes effect. Finally, the connectInput parameter connects the System.in to the console’s STDIN. (We must do this because we use readLine() in our app.) JMX Now, I don’t like println in the best of the times, and System.out.println is even worse. So, the last modification is to add JMX exporter and to expose the ActorSystemPerformance MBean. The rather baroque JMX code is: public interface ActorSystemPerformanceMXBean { float getMessagesPerSecond(); } public class ActorSystemPerformanceMXBeanImpl implements ActorSystemPerformanceMXBean{ private ActorSystemMessages messages; ActorSystemPerformanceMXBeanImpl(ActorSystemMessages messages) { this.messages = messages; } @Override public float getMessagesPerSecond() { return this.messages.average(); } } public class JMXEndpoint { public static void start(ActorSystemMessages messages) throws ... { MBeanServer mbs = ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer(); ObjectName name = new ObjectName("monitor:type=Performance"); ActorSystemPerformanceMXBeanImpl mbean = new ActorSystemPerformanceMXBeanImpl(messages); mbs.registerMBean(mbean, name); } } With this in place, we can remove the System.out.println and call the JMXEndpoint.start) method in the aspect’s constructor, giving us: @Aspect public class MonitorAspect { final ActorSystemMessages messages; public MonitorAspect() throws ... { this.messages = new ActorSystemMessages(); JMXEndpoint.start(messages); } @Pointcut(...) public void receiveMessagePointcut(Object msg) {} @Before(...) public void message(JoinPoint jp, Object msg) { messages.recordMessage(); } } Run the application using sbt run again, connect to the JMX MBean using jconsole and see the wonders: Summary This article is a simple exploration of AOP (as implemented in AspectJ) and its use in Scala and Akka. The implementation is very simplistic. If you use it in production, I will endorse you for Enterprise PHP on LinkedIn. However, it is an interesting exercise and really shows how Scala fits well into even the slightly more esoteric Java libraries. The source code for your compiling pleasure is at https//github.com/eigengo/activator-akka-aspectj.

Hi! Some time ago I have written an article about Mockito and using RETURNS_DEEP_STUBS when working with JAXB. Quite recently we have faced a similliar issue with deeply nesetd JAXB and the awesome testing framework written in Groovy called Spock. Natively Spock does not support creating deep stubs or spies so we needed to create a workaround for it and this article will show you how to do it. Project structure We will be working on the same data structure as in the RETURNS_DEEP_STUBS when working with JAXB article so the project structure will be quite simillar: As you can see the main difference is such that the tests are present in the /test/groovy/ folder instead of /test/java/ folder. Extended Spock Specification In order to use Spock as a testing framework you have to create Groovy test scripts that extend the Spock Specification class. The details of how to use Spock are available here. In this project I have created an abstract class that extends Specification and adds two additional methods for creating nested Test Doubles (I don't remember if I haven't seen a prototype of this approach somewhere on the internet). ExtendedSpockSpecification.groovy package com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.spock; import spock.lang.Specification /** * Created with IntelliJ IDEA. * User: MGrzejszczak * Date: 14.06.13 * Time: 15:26 */ abstract class ExtendedSpockSpecification extends Specification { /** * The method creates nested structure of spies for all the elements present in the property parameter. Those spies are set on the input object. * * @param object - object on which you want to create nested spies * @param property - field accessors delimited by a dot - JavaBean convention * @return Spy of the last object from the property path */ protected def createNestedSpies(object, String property) { def lastObject = object property.tokenize('.').inject object, { obj, prop -> if (obj[prop] == null) { def foundProp = obj.metaClass.properties.find { it.name == prop } obj[prop] = Spy(foundProp.type) } lastObject = obj[prop] } lastObject } /** * The method creates nested structure of mocks for all the elements present in the property parameter. Those mocks are set on the input object. * * @param object - object on which you want to create nested mocks * @param property - field accessors delimited by a dot - JavaBean convention * @return Mock of the last object from the property path */ protected def createNestedMocks(object, String property) { def lastObject = object property.tokenize('.').inject object, { obj, prop -> def foundProp = obj.metaClass.properties.find { it.name == prop } def mockedProp = Mock(foundProp.type) lastObject."${prop}" >> mockedProp lastObject = mockedProp } lastObject } } These two methods work in a very simillar manner. Assuming that the method's argument property looks as follows: "a.b.c.d" then the methods tokenize the string by "." and iterate over the array -["a","b","c","d"]. We then iterate over the properties of the Meta Class to find the one whose name is equal to prop (for example "a"). If that is the case we then use Spock's Mock/Spy method to create a Test Double of a given class (type). Finally we have to bind the mocked nested element to its parent. For the Spy it's easy since we set the value on the parent (lastObject = obj[prop]). For the mocks however we need to use the overloaded >> operator to record the behavior for our mock - that's why dynamically call the property that is present in the prop variable (lastObject."${prop}" >> mockedProp). Then we return from the closure the mocked/spied instance and we repeat the process for it Class to be tested Let's take a look at the class to be tested: PlayerServiceImpl.java package com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.service; import com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.model.PlayerDetails; /** * User: mgrzejszczak * Date: 08.06.13 * Time: 19:02 */ public class PlayerServiceImpl implements PlayerService { @Override public boolean isPlayerOfGivenCountry(PlayerDetails playerDetails, String country) { String countryValue = playerDetails.getClubDetails().getCountry().getCountryCode().getCountryCode().value(); return countryValue.equalsIgnoreCase(country); } } The test class And now the test class: PlayerServiceImplWrittenUsingSpockTest.groovy package com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.service import com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.model.* import com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.spock.ExtendedSpockSpecification /** * User: mgrzejszczak * Date: 14.06.13 * Time: 16:06 */ class PlayerServiceImplWrittenUsingSpockTest extends ExtendedSpockSpecification { public static final String COUNTRY_CODE_ENG = "ENG"; PlayerServiceImpl objectUnderTest def setup(){ objectUnderTest = new PlayerServiceImpl() } def "should return true if country code is the same when creating nested structures using groovy"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = new PlayerDetails( clubDetails: new ClubDetails( country: new CountryDetails( countryCode: new CountryCodeDetails( countryCode: CountryCodeType.ENG ) ) ) ) when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } def "should return true if country code is the same when creating nested structures using spock mocks - requires CGLIB for non interface types"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() ClubDetails clubDetails = Mock() CountryDetails countryDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = Mock() countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.ENG countryDetails.countryCode >> countryCodeDetails clubDetails.country >> countryDetails playerDetails.clubDetails >> clubDetails when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } def "should return true if country code is the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedMocks"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedMocks(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.ENG when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } def "should return false if country code is not the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification createNestedMocks"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedMocks(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.PL when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: !playerIsOfGivenCountry } def "should return true if country code is the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedSpies"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Spy() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedSpies(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode = CountryCodeType.ENG when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } def "should return false if country code is not the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedSpies"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Spy() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedSpies(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode = CountryCodeType.PL when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: !playerIsOfGivenCountry } } Let's move through the test methods one by one. First I present the code and then have a quick description of the presented snippet. def "should return true if country code is the same when creating nested structures using groovy"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = new PlayerDetails( clubDetails: new ClubDetails( country: new CountryDetails( countryCode: new CountryCodeDetails( countryCode: CountryCodeType.ENG ) ) ) ) when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } Here you could find the approach of creating nested structures by using the Groovy feature of passing properties to be set in the constructor. def "should return true if country code is the same when creating nested structures using spock mocks - requires CGLIB for non interface types"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() ClubDetails clubDetails = Mock() CountryDetails countryDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = Mock() countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.ENG countryDetails.countryCode >> countryCodeDetails clubDetails.country >> countryDetails playerDetails.clubDetails >> clubDetails when: boolean playerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } Here you can find a test that creates mocks using Spock - mind you that you need CGLIB as a dependency when you are mocking non interface types. def "should return true if country code is the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedMocks"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedMocks(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.ENG when: booleanplayerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } Here you have an example of creating nested mocks using the createNestedMocks method. def "should return false if country code is not the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification createNestedMocks"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Mock() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedMocks(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode >> CountryCodeType.PL when: booleanplayerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: !playerIsOfGivenCountry } An example showing that creating nested mocks using the createNestedMocks method really works - should return false for improper country code. def "should return true if country code is the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedSpies"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Spy() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedSpies(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode = CountryCodeType.ENG when: booleanplayerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: playerIsOfGivenCountry } Here you have an example of creating nested spies using the createNestedSpies method. def "should return false if country code is not the same using ExtendedSpockSpecification's createNestedSpies"() { given: PlayerDetails playerDetails = Spy() CountryCodeDetails countryCodeDetails = createNestedSpies(playerDetails, "clubDetails.country.countryCode") countryCodeDetails.countryCode = CountryCodeType.PL when: booleanplayerIsOfGivenCountry = objectUnderTest.isPlayerOfGivenCountry(playerDetails, COUNTRY_CODE_ENG); then: !playerIsOfGivenCountry } An example showing that creating nested spies using the createNestedSpies method really works - should return false for improper country code. Summary In this post I have shown you how you can create nested mocks and spies using Spock. It can be useful especially when you are working with nested structures such as JAXB. Still you have to bear in mind that those structures to some extend violate the Law of Demeter. If you check my previous article about Mockito you would see that: We are getting the nested elements from the JAXB generated classes. Although it violates the Law of Demeter it is quite common to call methods of structures because JAXB generated classes are in fact structures so in fact I fully agree with Martin Fowler that it should be called the Suggestion of Demeter. And in case of this example the idea is the same - we are talking about structures so we don't violate the Law of Demeter. Advantages With a single method you can mock/spy nested elements Code cleaner than creating tons of objects that you then have to manually set Disadvantages Your IDE won't help you with providing the property names since the properties are presented as Strings You have to set Test Doubles only in the Specification context (and sometimes you want to go outside this scope) Sources As usual the sources are available at BitBucket and GitHub.

The Java API for JSON Processing (JSR-353) is the Java standard for producing and consuming JSON which was introduced as part of Java EE 7. JSR-353 includes object (DOM like) and stream (StAX like) APIs. In this post I will demonstrate the initial JSR-353 support we have added to MOXy's JSON binding in EclipseLink 2.6. You can now use MOXy to marshal to: javax.json.JsonArrayBuilder javax.json.JsonObjectBuilder And unmarshal from: javax.json.JsonStructure javax.json.JsonObject javax.json.JsonArray You can try this out today using a nightly build of EclipseLink 2.6.0: http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/downloads/nightly.php The JSR-353 reference implementation is available here: https://java.net/projects/jsonp/downloads/download/ri/javax.json-ri-1.0.zip Java Model Below is the simple customer model that we will use for this post. Note for this example we are only using the standard JAXB (JSR-222) annotations. Customer package blog.jsonp.moxy; import java.util.*; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlType(propOrder={"id", "firstName", "lastName", "phoneNumbers"}) public class Customer { private int id; private String firstName; private String lastName; private List phoneNumbers = new ArrayList(); public int getId() { return id; } public void setId(int id) { this.id = id; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } @XmlElement(nillable=true) public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } @XmlElement public List getPhoneNumbers() { return phoneNumbers; } } PhoneNumber package blog.jsonp.moxy; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class PhoneNumber { private String type; private String number; public String getType() { return type; } public void setType(String type) { this.type = type; } public String getNumber() { return number; } public void setNumber(String number) { this.number = number; } } jaxb.properties To specify MOXy as your JAXB provider you need to include a file called jaxb.properties in the same package as your domain model with the following entry (see: Specifying EclipseLink MOXy as your JAXB Provider) javax.xml.bind.context.factory=org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextFactory Marshal Demo In the demo code below we will use a combination of JSR-353 and MOXy APIs to produce JSON. JSR-353's JsonObjectBuilder and JsonArrayBuilder are used to produces instances of JsonObject and JsonArray. We can use MOXy to marshal to these builders by wrapping them in instances of MOXy's JsonObjectBuilderResult and JsonArrayBuilderResult. package blog.jsonp.moxy; import java.util.*; import javax.json.*; import javax.json.stream.JsonGenerator; import javax.xml.bind.*; import org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextProperties; import org.eclipse.persistence.oxm.json.*; public class MarshalDemo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { // Create the EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) Marshaller Map jaxbProperties = new HashMap(2); jaxbProperties.put(JAXBContextProperties.MEDIA_TYPE, "application/json"); jaxbProperties.put(JAXBContextProperties.JSON_INCLUDE_ROOT, false); JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(new Class[] {Customer.class}, jaxbProperties); Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller(); // Create the JsonArrayBuilder JsonArrayBuilder customersArrayBuilder = Json.createArrayBuilder(); // Build the First Customer Customer customer = new Customer(); customer.setId(1); customer.setFirstName("Jane"); customer.setLastName(null); PhoneNumber phoneNumber = new PhoneNumber(); phoneNumber.setType("cell"); phoneNumber.setNumber("555-1111"); customer.getPhoneNumbers().add(phoneNumber); // Marshal the First Customer Object into the JsonArray JsonArrayBuilderResult result = new JsonArrayBuilderResult(customersArrayBuilder); marshaller.marshal(customer, result); // Build List of PhoneNumer Objects for Second Customer List phoneNumbers = new ArrayList(2); PhoneNumber workPhone = new PhoneNumber(); workPhone.setType("work"); workPhone.setNumber("555-2222"); phoneNumbers.add(workPhone); PhoneNumber homePhone = new PhoneNumber(); homePhone.setType("home"); homePhone.setNumber("555-3333"); phoneNumbers.add(homePhone); // Marshal the List of PhoneNumber Objects JsonArrayBuilderResult arrayBuilderResult = new JsonArrayBuilderResult(); marshaller.marshal(phoneNumbers, arrayBuilderResult); customersArrayBuilder // Use JSR-353 APIs for Second Customer's Data .add(Json.createObjectBuilder() .add("id", 2) .add("firstName", "Bob") .addNull("lastName") // Included Marshalled PhoneNumber Objects .add("phoneNumbers", arrayBuilderResult.getJsonArrayBuilder()) ) .build(); // Write JSON to System.out Map jsonProperties = new HashMap(1); jsonProperties.put(JsonGenerator.PRETTY_PRINTING, true); JsonWriterFactory writerFactory = Json.createWriterFactory(jsonProperties); JsonWriter writer = writerFactory.createWriter(System.out); writer.writeArray(customersArrayBuilder.build()); writer.close(); } } Highlighted lines: 36, 37, 38, 54, 55, 64 Output Below is the output from running the marshal demo (MarshalDemo). The highlighted portions (lines 2-12 and 18-25) correspond to the portions that were populated from our Java model. [ { "id":1, "firstName":"Jane", "lastName":null, "phoneNumbers":[ { "type":"cell", "number":"555-1111" } ] }, { "id":2, "firstName":"Bob", "lastName":null, "phoneNumbers":[ { "type":"work", "number":"555-2222" }, { "type":"home", "number":"555-3333" } ] } ] Highlighted lines: 2-12, 18-25 Unmarshal Demo MOXy enables you to unmarshal from a JSR-353 JsonStructure (JsonObject or JsonArray). To do this simply wrap the JsonStructure in an instance of MOXy's JsonStructureSource and use one of the unmarshal operations that takes an instance of Source. package blog.jsonp.moxy; import java.io.FileInputStream; import java.util.*; import javax.json.*; import javax.xml.bind.*; import org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextProperties; import org.eclipse.persistence.oxm.json.JsonStructureSource; public class UnmarshalDemo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { try (FileInputStream is = new FileInputStream("src/blog/jsonp/moxy/input.json")) { // Create the EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) Unmarshaller Map jaxbProperties = new HashMap(2); jaxbProperties.put(JAXBContextProperties.MEDIA_TYPE, "application/json"); jaxbProperties.put(JAXBContextProperties.JSON_INCLUDE_ROOT, false); JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(new Class[] {Customer.class}, jaxbProperties); Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jc.createUnmarshaller(); // Parse the JSON JsonReader jsonReader = Json.createReader(is); // Unmarshal Root Level JsonArray JsonArray customersArray = jsonReader.readArray(); JsonStructureSource arraySource = new JsonStructureSource(customersArray); List customers = (List) unmarshaller.unmarshal(arraySource, Customer.class) .getValue(); for(Customer customer : customers) { System.out.println(customer.getFirstName()); } // Unmarshal Nested JsonObject JsonObject customerObject = customersArray.getJsonObject(1); JsonStructureSource objectSource = new JsonStructureSource(customerObject); Customer customer = unmarshaller.unmarshal(objectSource, Customer.class) .getValue(); for(PhoneNumber phoneNumber : customer.getPhoneNumbers()) { System.out.println(phoneNumber.getNumber()); } } } } Highlighted lines: 27-30, 37-39 Input (input.json) The following JSON input will be converted to a JsonArray using a JsonReader. [ { "id":1, "firstName":"Jane", "lastName":null, "phoneNumbers":[ { "type":"cell", "number":"555-1111" } ] }, { "id":2, "firstName":"Bob", "lastName":null, "phoneNumbers":[ { "type":"work", "number":"555-2222" }, { "type":"home", "number":"555-3333" } ] } ] Highlighted lines: 4, 15, 20, 24 Output Below is the output from running the unmarshal demo (UnmarshalDemo). Jane Bob 555-2222 555-3333

CQEngine or collection query engine is a library that allows you to build indices over java collections and query them for objects using exposed properties. It offers similar capability to LINQ in .net but is thought to be faster because it builds indices over collections before querying them and uses set theory instead of iterations. In this post we will see how to query a simple collection of objects, in our example, a collection of users of a hypothetical system, using CQEngine. In a subsequent post, we will also see how iteratively searching a collection compares to querying via CQEngine. The first step is to get the CQEengine jar file. Download the jar from the CQEngine website or if you are using Maven, add the following dependency. com.googlecode.cqengine cqengine 1.0.3 Next, lets create the Class whose object we will be searching for: package co.syntx.examples.cqengine; import com.googlecode.cqengine.attribute.Attribute; import com.googlecode.cqengine.attribute.SimpleAttribute; public class User { private String username; private String password; private String fullname; private Role role; public User(String username, String password, String fullname, Role role) { super(); this.username = username; this.password = password; this.fullname = fullname; this.role = role; } public static final Attribute FULL_NAME = new SimpleAttribute("fullname") { public String getValue(User user) { return user.fullname; } }; public static final Attribute USERNAME = new SimpleAttribute("username") { public String getValue(User user) { return user.username; } }; public String getUsername() { return username; } public void setUsername(String username) { this.username = username; } public String getPassword() { return password; } public void setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; } public String getFullname() { return fullname; } public void setFullname(String fullname) { this.fullname = fullname; } public Role getRole() { return role; } public void setRole(Role role) { this.role = role; } } Next, we write a class, to perform our searches. I will go function by function. 1. Function to Build a Test Indexed Collection: In the following function, we build an indexed collection, define indices on attributes, and populate this collection with a certain number of objects. In actual usage, your collection will probably be filled with objects being returned from the DB, read from a file or other similar scenarios. public void buildIndexedCollection(int size) throws Exception { indexedUsers = CQEngine.newInstance(); indexedUsers.addIndex(HashIndex.onAttribute(User.FULL_NAME)); indexedUsers.addIndex(SuffixTreeIndex.onAttribute(User.FULL_NAME)); for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) { String username = RandomStringGenerator.generateRandomString(8,RandomStringGenerator.Mode.ALPHANUMERIC); String password = RandomStringGenerator.generateRandomString(8,RandomStringGenerator.Mode.ALPHANUMERIC); String fullname = RandomStringGenerator.generateRandomString(5,RandomStringGenerator.Mode.ALPHA) + " " + RandomStringGenerator.generateRandomString(5,RandomStringGenerator.Mode.ALPHA); Role role = new Role(); role.setName("admin"); indexedUsers.add(new User(username, password, fullname, role)); } } In line 3 we are initializing a new Indexed Collection, a reference of which is stored in the class variable indexedUsers. The reference is of type IndexedCollection In lines 4 and 5, we define two indices i) a Hash Index suitable for equal style queries. ii) a Suffix Index suitable for ends with style queried. For the purpose of this example, we are building indices only on the the Full name field. In line 8, we use a random string generator to populate dummy objects. In line 14 we add our object to our indexed collection. 2. Function to Perform Indexed Search for Exact Matches: In this function, we are querying for names that exactly match a given name. The equal function takes in the attribute upon which to perform the query and the value to search. The method equal is statically imported via a import static com.googlecode.cqengine.query.QueryFactory.*; In the example below, we are looping the results returned by the retrieve method and not doing anything with it. In your case, you may choose to return the Iterator returned by retrieve. public void indexedSearchForEquals(String fullname) throws Exception { Query query = equal(User.FULL_NAME, fullname); for (User user : indexedUsers.retrieve(query)) { // System.out.println(user.getFullname()); } } 3. Function to Perform Indexed Search for Ends With Matches: In this function, we are querying for names that end with a certain suffix. public void indexedSearchForEndsWith(String endswith) throws Exception { Query query1 = endsWith(User.FULL_NAME, endswith); for (User user : indexedUsers.retrieve(query1)) { // System.out.println(user.getFullname()); } } 4. Function to Perform Indexed Search for Equals or Ends With Matches: This function is a combination of both queries mentioned below and has an or relation between them. public void indexedSearchForEqualOrEndsWith(String equals, String ends) throws Exception { Query query = or(equal(User.FULL_NAME, equals),endsWith(User.FULL_NAME, ends)); for (User user : indexedUsers.retrieve(query)) { // System.out.println(user.getFullname()); } } 5. Putting it together: All the functions above belong to a class called CQEngineTest. We create a new object, build a test collection, then search for either exact matches, strings that end with a certain suffix or either. CQEngineTest test = new CQEngineTest(); test.buildIndexedCollection(size); test.indexedSearchForEqualOrEndsWith("test", "test"); In this example, we have used a Hash Index and a Suffix Tree Index. There are many other types of indices that you can choose depending on the type of query that you want to perform. A list of these indices and when to use them can be found on the cqengine project page. Also, apart from equal or endswith operations, there are others that you would typically expect to find. In a subsequent post we will also see how an indexed search compares with a typical iterative search in terms of times.