DEV Community: Alexandru Muntean

Checkstyle

Alexandru Muntean — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 22:54:16 +0000

Hello there!

This is the second tool I encountered in my search journey and it looks like we had lots of styling issues.

It is true that most of them can be easily resolved by having a common formatter style installed in the IDE, but for custom and more accurate styling, this tool can come in handy for you.

Checkstyle

It is an awesome tool from developers to developers, meant to automate a bit the process of checking Java code, sparing humans from it, and letting them focusing on important things.

Installation

There are a few ways to install it into your projects, such as:

Direct JAR which can be taken from Github
Using it through your IDE, check this list for the suitable one for you
Maven plugin set at build step in your project's pom.xml file

Usage

Depending on your chosen path, there are different ways to customize your code conventions. For this article, I chose to write more about the last option, which implies a simple addition in your pom.xml file within the plugins section:

<plugin>
   <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>3.1.1</version>
   <configuration>
     <consoleOutput>true</consoleOutput>
     <violationSeverity>warning</violationSeverity>  <!-- now build fails for Warnings -->
     <failOnViolation>true</failsOnViolation>
     <configLocation>some-dir/your-checkstyle.xml</configLocation>
     <sourceDirectories>
        <sourceDirectory>src/main/java</sourceDirectory> <!-- Root directory from where the checking process starts -->
     </sourceDirectories>
   </configuration>
   <executions>
     <execution>
       <id>validate</id>
       <phase>validate</phase>
       <goals>
         <goal>check</goal>
       </goals>
     </execution>
   </executions>
 </plugin>

Now, whenever the project is built, this checker will be triggered, and in case there at least one warning, then the build will Fail.

Code conventions

The official documentation provides a nice and easy to use list of all standards checks that this tool supports. You should always refer to it when you are looking for some explanations or details for a certain module out there.

On the other hand, there are a couple of presets files that can be used almost out of the box:

Or, you can create a custom one that suits your team and your project starting from the list or from the presets.

That's pretty much it, I hope you enjoy it and that it will come in handy for your current or incoming projects, but don't necessarily believe me, try it yourself.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series!

Cover photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

ArchUnit

Alexandru Muntean — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 20:11:57 +0000

Hello there!

This is the first tool I encountered in my search journey and it seems that slowly but surely takes effect while we are focusing only on the business logic of the project.

ArchUnit

Its purpose is to help developers ensure an architecture level quality by writing a suite test case to cover all that matters to the project and the team involved.

This library offers great support for newcomers and has different ways to include it in your project based on the JUnit version or an alternative in case there is no JUnit used.

In the above list, you can find, for each option, several Test classes that have specific goals e.g. CyclicDependencyRulesTest.java (which I warmly recommend you trying at least)

Also, each of the Test classes has an associated Real Test class in which the applied rules are explained.

I hope it will help you too, and feel free to come up with suggestions or alternatives. Happy coding!

Stay tuned for the next article in the series!

Cover photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Introduction

Alexandru Muntean — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 20:11:50 +0000

Hello there!

I am in a small team of 3 Java developers, including myself, who work hard to finish a complex project which is suitable for 4 or 5 people.

This project has a critical deadline and we are already 1 month behind because of the team availability, and the only thing we can do is to speed things up by reducing time on code reviews and still keeping the code quality and performance, limiting the technical debt.

Therefore, I said to myself, there should be some tools, plugins, or frameworks to use in order to boost a bit our daily work.

Due to this opportunity, I am creating here this series with short but insightful articles to introduce and cover every tool I found and use.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series!

Cover photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Conferences in Europe

Alexandru Muntean — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 07:08:45 +0000

Hello everyone,

I am a middle level Software Developer that uses by daily basics the Java-Spring tech stack and I wanna participate to a conference this year but I don't know which one.

So, I am wondering which are the best or worth going conferences in Europe to attend and why?

Thanks in advance! :)

My first Pull-request to an open-source project

Alexandru Muntean — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 20:30:54 +0000

I enjoy helping others, but in terms of programming I am just asking around people from different communities about solutions with regards to my issues. I think it is time for me as well to start giving back to the community and help others in need.

Having this in mind, I decided to start small and make a simple Pull-request to an open-source project on Github like Spring-framework.

I read the conduit and how to contribute to the project, but I could not find there where to modify and how to create a Pull-request with my changes.

Here comes in handy this tutorial which I recommend to any of us that is starting helping out on open-source projects. It contains all the information needed in order to achieve this and it is very explicit.

Happy coding!

How to reply to an anonymous user over Websockets

Alexandru Muntean — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 18:58:59 +0000

Hello everyone!

This is my first post here on dev.to and I made myself some courage to write it because I always wanted to have a blog or somewhere to share the things I learn.

So here we go.

A couple of weeks ago, I started looking a bit more deeply into the Spring Websocket and STOMP because I had 2 applications, a Server and a Client, which had to communicate in a way that the Client requests some data and the Server replies to that request.

I know it sounds very basic, but the challenge I had to face was replying from the Server to a so called anonymous user because the Client application is not a user per se.

So looking here and there on several websites, I found that I can make this particular case to be somehow similar to the one when you are using the users of the main application.

The idea is to make the anonymous user to be visible and the key is to create a particular sessionId for him when the handshake between the 2 applications is made:

public class CustomHandshakeHandler extends DefaultHandshakeHandler {
  // Custom class for storing principal
  @Override
  protected Principal determineUser(ServerHttpRequest request,
                                    WebSocketHandler wsHandler,
                                    Map<String, Object> attributes) {
    // Generate principal with UUID as name
    return new StompPrincipal(UUID.randomUUID().toString());
  }
}

And I also extended the main java.security.Principal class into a StompPrincipal in order to have something custom for my case:

public class StompPrincipal implements Principal {

  private String name;

  public StompPrincipal(String name) {
    this.name = name;
  }

  @Override
  public String getName() {
    return name;
  }
}

And that's pretty much it, now listening on some path like /tutorial-request and having as parameter an object of SimpMessageHeaderAccessor, I can retrieve the session information and reply direct to user that made the request:

  @Autowired
  private SimpMessagingTemplate messagingTemplate;

  @MessageMapping("/tutorial-request")
  public void handleRequest(SimpleRequest request, SimpMessageHeaderAccessor headerAccessor) {
    String sessionId = headerAccessor.getSessionId();
    log.info("Handling session with id {} receiving message {} from {}", sessionId, request.getText(), request.getFrom());
    SimpleResponse response = new SimpleResponse("Hello!");
    messagingTemplate.convertAndSendToUser(headerAccessor.getUser().getName(), "/queue/tutorial-request", response);
    log.info("Replied to {} with message {}", sessionId, response);
  }

I skipped adding the SimpleRequest and SimpleResponse because these are just simple objects that can be found on the repository together with the entire code from above:

alexandrumm / spring-tutorials

Resources for Spring tutorials

Feel free to tell me your thoughts in the comments, I know I have a lot to learn and to improve in writing posts, I hope this is just the beginning of it and I would appreciate any suggestions, so please do so.

Happy coding!