When building a service in gRPC you define the message and service definition in a .proto file. gRPC generates client, server and DTO implementations automatically for you in multiple languages. At the end of this post you will understand how to make your gRPC API also accessible via HTTP JSON by using Envoy as a transcoding proxy. You can test it out yourself by running the Java code in the attached github repo. For a quick introduction on gRPC itself, please read gRPC as an alternative to REST.

In Micronaut we can inject configuration properties in different ways into our beans. We can use for example the @Value annotation using a string value with a placeholder for the configuration property name. If we don’t want to use a placeholder we can also use the @Property annotation and set the name attribute to the configuration property name. We have to pay attention to the format of the configuration property name we use. If we refer to a configuration property name using @Value or @Property we must use lowercased and hyphen separated names (also known as kebab casing). Even if the name of the configuration property is camel cased in the configuration file. For example if we have a configuration property sample.theAnswer in our application.properties file, we must use the name sample.the-answer to get the value.

In the following Spock specification we see how to use it in code. The specification defines two beans that use the @Value and @Property annotations and we see that we need to use kebab casing for the configuration property names, even though we use camel casing to set the configuration property values:

When creating a Spring Boot Rest service, you can configure Spring to convert a LocalDateTime to display as a ISO-8601 date string when returning a JSON response. To get this working you have to do a few things. Firstly, you need the following dependency: com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-jsr310

This dependency has all the JSON serialisers and deserialisers for the Java 8 time API, and when you use Spring Boot with auto configuration, it should load all the correct serialisers. Secondly, you need to add the following to your application properties:

I really like maven for the structured way it provides for defining and building a project. But sometimes I wish for a less verbose notation than the XML of the Project Object Model (POM). For example, gradles dependency notation is far shorter than mavens dependency declaration. Looking for a less verbose way to declare a maven POM, I discovered polyglot maven. It are maven extensions that allow the maven POM to eb written in another dialect than XML. Since you see YAML more and more I decided to try that dialect, and see if my maven descriptor would be clearer.

In my early days I spent most of my time fixing bugs on a huge enterprise application, so by now I learned from experience that a lot of bugs could have been easily prevented. This is why I prefer a Functional Programming style, I love how FP handles state. As a software consultant I get to switch companies and teams quite regularly and most projects I have been working on use java 7 or 8. This almost always leads to a few dicussions regarding programming style. So today I would like to talk about good FP principles, and how Java makes them hard (and why languages like Kotlin are awesome).

Infrastructure automation basically is the process of scripting environments — from installing an OS to installing and configuring servers on instances. It also includes configuring how the instances and software communicate with one another, and much more. Automation allows you to redeploy your infrastructure or rebuild it from scratch, because you have a repeatable documented process. It also allows you to scale the same configuration to a single node or to thousands of nodes. In the past years, several open source and commercial tools have emerged to support infrastructure automation. These tools include Ansible, Chef, Terraform and Puppet. They support cloud platforms, but also virtual and physical environments. On Google Cloud Platform you have the possibility to use Cloud Deployment Manager. The Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to automate the configuration and deployment of your Google Cloud with parallel, repeatable deployments and template-driven configurations.

Normally we would consume server-sent events (SSE) in a web browser, but we can also consume them in our code on the server. Micronaut has a low-level HTTP client with a SseClient interface that we can use to get server-sent events. The interface has an eventStream method with different arguments that return a Publisher type of the Reactive Streams API. We can use the RxSseClient interface to get back RxJava2 Flowable return type instead of Publisher type. We can also use Micronaut’s declarative HTTP client, which we define using the @Client annotation, that supports server-sent events with the correct annotation attributes.

In our example we first create a controller in Micronaut to send out server-sent events. We must create method that returns a Publisher type with Event objects. These Event objects can contains some attributes like id and name, but also the actual object we want to send:

In the first part we setup a local Keycloak instance. In this blog we will see how we can leverage Keycloak to secure our frontend. For this purpose we will create a small Spring Boot application that will serve a webpage. The next and last blog will show how authentication can be used between services.

"We’re agile! Just build it!" Or on the other hand; "agile does not support Software Architecture so we should stop doing agile". Two very different opinions that you can sometimes hear within the same company. Which one is right? Or are they both wrong? Should we stop doing architecture to be more agile? Why do we even need architecture? In this post I’ll give my view on the matter and hope to inspire you to combine Agile and Architecture in your organisation.