Archive: May 2018

Gradle Goodness: Command Line Options For Custom Tasks

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Hubert Klein Ikkink

Gradle added an incubation feature to Gradle 4.6 to add command line options for custom tasks. This means we can run a task using Gradle and add command line options to pass information to the task. Without this feature we would have to use project properties passed via the -P or --project-property. The good thing about the new feature is that the Gradle help task displays extra information about the command line options supported by a custom task.

To add a command line option we simply use the @Option annotation on the setter method of a task property. We must make sure the argument for the setter method is either a boolean, Boolean, String, enum, List<String> or List<enum>. The @Option annotation requires an option argument with the name of the option as it must be entered by the user. Optionally we can add a description property with a description about the option. It is good to add the description, because the help task of Gradle displays this information and helps the user of our custom task.

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Microservice architecture diagram composition

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Tim te Beek

A low code approach to composing microservice architecture diagrams from per service context diagrams.

On a recent assignment I was one of multiple new engineers joining a start-up transitioning into a scale-up. The past two years had been spent rapidly developing to prove the concept, and while at the outset some diagrams were drawn up, at the time I joined these were outdated, lacking or even misleading. To help get ourselves and other new developers up to speed, Andrew Morgan and I set out to create architecture diagrams for the system as a whole.

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JSHeroes 2018 Conference Report

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Martijn van der Wijst

In this report Sjoerd Valk (@Sjoerdus) and Martijn van der Wijst (@vanderwise) try to sum up their experiences in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. They stayed in Cluj during the 17th and 21st of April to attend the JSHeroes conference, a frontend conference all about JavaScript. Presented by heroes of the JavaScript open source community. Although most of the speakers admitted they weren’t really heroes, the very last speaker gave his talk in a hero-esque costume.

This year marks only the second edition of JSHeroes, but it’s organized really professional. Speakers are from all over the world, and the location is a chique hotel. A few kilometers out of the city center. Its grandeur reminds us a bit of the Grand Budapest Hotel. The name too by the way: the Grand Hotel Italia. On Wednesday we followed an Angular Masterclass. Thursday and Friday are the JSHeroes conference days. The talks are just 30 minutes each. A quick pace and quite diverse topics. The popular frameworks (React, Angular and Vue) were covered much, but also webfonts, Codesandbox, and V8, the engine behind JavaScript.

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