Since Gradle 5 we can easily use a bill of materials (BOM) in our build file to get recommended dependency versions. The dependency versions defined in the BOM are dependency constraints in Gradle. This means the dependencies we define in our build that are part of the BOM don’t need a version, because the version is resolved via the dependency constraint that is defined in the BOM. Also transitive dependency versions are resolved using the BOM if applicable. We use the dependency handler method platform to define the BOM we want to import. The versions in the BOM are recommendations. We can override the recommendation by specifying the version for a dependency found in the BOM with an explicit version.

From Maven builds we know the dependencyManagement section in our POM file. In the section we can describe dependencies with their version and later in the dependencies section we can refer to the dependency without the version. We can use dependency constraints in Gradle to do the same thing. A dependency constraint can be used to define the version or version range for a dependency defined in our scripts or a transitive dependency. Just like a dependency the dependency constraint is defined for a configuration, so we can fine tune the constraints to the correct configuration.

I like to create immutable classes. When using lombok we can easily create immutable classes.

With the release of Asciidoctor 2.0.0 we get nice help on the basic syntax of Asciidoc with the command-line option --help syntax. This gives us samples of the syntax in Asciidoc markup. As mentioned by Dan Allen on Twitter we can pipe the syntax sample to Asciidoctor itself to get a HTML page:

Micronaut can convert String values defined as a number followed by (case-insensitive) KB/MB/GB to a number value in certain cases. The conversion service in Micronaut supports the @ReadableBytes annotation that we can apply to a method parameter. Micronaut will then parse the String value and convert it to a number. The value 1Kb is converted to 1024. We can use this for example in a configuration class or path variable in a controller.

Micronaut supports the RFC-6570 URI template specification to define URI variables in a path definition. The path definition can be a value of the @Controller annotation or any of the routing annotations for example @Get or @Post. We can define a path variable as {?binding*} to support binding of request parameters to all properties of an object type that is defined as method argument with the name binding. We can even use the Bean Validation API (JSR380) to validate the values of the request parameters if we add an implementation of this API to our class path.

Working with SQL database from Groovy code is very easy using the groovy.sql.Sql class. The class has several methods to execute a SQL query, but we have to take special care if we use methods from Sql that take a GString argument. Groovy will extract all variable expressions and use them as values for placeholders in a PreparedStatement constructed from the SQL query. If we have variable expressions that should not be extracted as parameters for a PreparedStatement we must use the Sql.expand method. This method will make the variable expression a groovy.sql.ExpandedVariable object. This object is not used as parameter for a PreparedStatement query, but the value is evaluated as GString variable expression.

Spring Boot 2.1 introduced log groups. A log group is a logical name for one or more loggers. We can define log groups in our application configuration. Then we can set the log level for a group, so all loggers in the group will get the same log level. This can be very useful to change a log level for multiple loggers that belong together with one setting. Spring Boot already provides two log groups by default: web and sql. In the following list we see which loggers are part of the default log groups:

To get an overview of all Gradle tasks in our project we need to run the tasks task. Since Gradle 5.1 we can use the --group option followed by a group name. Gradle will then show all tasks belonging to the group and not the other tasks in the project.