It’s quite common in a microservice style architecture to provide a type-safe client library that other services can use to communicate with your service. This can be package with a Retrofit client published to nexus by the maintainer of the service. Some projects might also generate that code from a OpenAPI spec or a gRPC proto file.

Since Mapstruct version 1.3.0.Final is out, we are able to better integrate with Lombok Builder pattern. Mapstruct is a library that takes away a lot of boilerplate code for mapping between POJO’s. With Mapstruct there is no need for implementing the real mapping itself.

A big part of the fun of starting a new project is making a design and choosing an appropriate technology stack. If you are a Java developer and need to access a SQL database, a common choice is to use JPA with an ORM framework such as Hibernate. This adds a lot of complexity to your project for multiple reasons. In my experience, writing performing queries requires careful analysis. Writing custom queries is possible but more complex. For starters, JPQL/HQL queries are parsed at runtime and the criteria API is far from user friendly. Moreover, the extensive use of annotations makes it harder to quickly see how the database is structured.

After my last post, it would be a good time to do a bit more of a technical story. The goal will be to set up a Hello World application using the Play framework, a front-end based on Angular running on a Docker image, deployed in your local running Kubernetes!
So let’s play!

Nowadays you can’t walk into an IT department without hearing discussions about containerization. Should we move to OpenStack or OpenShift? Do we want to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry? What about Docker Swarm or Kubernetes? How to integrate our new kubernetes cluster into our CI/CD pipelines?