Integration testing Spring controllers

Time-constrained projects sometimes mandate crude realism as to the type and extent of test coverage in a software project. You'll find arguments for and against testing in the entire spectrum of opinions from "tests are luxury we can't afford" to "regressions are luxury we can't afford". Constrained or not, there is rarely a good excuse … Continue reading Integration testing Spring controllers →

On JPA identifiers and business keys (or why business keys are a bad idea)

JPA, and for that matter Hibernate, depends on identifying entity instances (I'll refer to them as entities for short) by some key. That key can either be a single property (like a numeric ID column in the corresponding table) or a business key (also referred to as natural key). Business keys are entity properties which … Continue reading On JPA identifiers and business keys (or why business keys are a bad idea) →

On coarse- vs. fine-grained synchronization

Performance related topics seem to constantly attract attention and everyone seems to have strong opinions on the matter. Writing code that can be proved [1] to perform according to a certain pattern is probably not the worst place to start with, although the web is full of counterintuitive [2] examples [3] where hardware details weigh … Continue reading On coarse- vs. fine-grained synchronization →

Tomcat, Spring and memory leaks when undeploying or redeploying an web application

In this post I'll talk about a new kind of memory leak in Spring applications involving transaction management and initializing beans. About memory leaks when undeploying a web application While developing a web application with Spring and Tomcat I frequently run out of heap space. The web is full of stories about this. There is … Continue reading Tomcat, Spring and memory leaks when undeploying or redeploying an web application →

Spring @Value and resolving property names with dots

I'm moving a legacy application (I seem to be doing that a lot recently) to Spring and injecting properties with @Value into Spring managed beans all over the place. And it doesn't work: public class SomeService{ @Value("#{the.org.namespace.someProperty}") private String someProperty; } Dots have apparently a special meaning, so this fails with a message that 'the' … Continue reading Spring @Value and resolving property names with dots →