Nicolas Fränkel

Every now and then, there’s an angry post or comment bitching about how the Spring framework is full of XML, how terrible and verbose it is, and how the author would never use it because of that. Of course, that is completely crap. First, when Spring was created, XML was pretty hot. J2EE deployment descriptors (yes, that was the name at the time) was XML-based. Anyway, it’s 2017 folks, and there are multiple ways to skin a cat. This article aims at listing the different ways a Sprin

When Java came out some decades ago, it was pretty innovative at the time. In particular, its exception handling mechanism was a great improvement over previous C/C++. For example, in order to read from the file, there could be a lot of exceptions happening: the file can be absent, it can be read-only, etc.

At conferences, it’s common to get gifts at booths. In general, you need to pass some some sort of challenge. Some of those challenges involve answering a code puzzle, like guessing the output of running some code snippet.

Every now and then, there’s a post predicting the death of the Java language. The funny thing is that none of them writes about a date. But to be honest, they are all probably true. This is the fate of every language: to disappear into oblivion - or more precisely to be used less and less for new projects.

I’ve been asked to design new courses for the next semester at my local university. Historically, I create course slides with Power Point and lab instructions with Word. There are other possible alternatives, for slides and documents: Google Slides, A bunch of JavaScript frameworks (Reveal.js, Impress.js, etc.), Dedicated e-learning platforms (Moodle, etc.), etc.

Last week, I wrote on how to design a generic Docker image for Maven-based auto-executable webapps. The designed build file has 3 different stages: checkout from Github, build with Maven and execute with Java. The Maven build stage takes quite a long time, mostly due to: Executing testsDownloading dependencies Tests can be executed earlier in the build chain - then skipped for Docker, this post will focus on speeding up the download of the dependencies. Let’s check each option in turn.

Since the Docker 'revolution', I’ve been interested in creating a Dockefile for Spring applications. I’m far from an ardent practitioner, but the principle of creating the Dockerfile is dead simple. As in Java - or probably any programming language, however, while it’s easy to achieve something that works, it’s much harder to create something that works well.

At the root of Kotlin’s Collection API lies the Iterator interface, similar to Java’s. But the similitude stops after that. java.util.ListIterator features are broken down into different contracts.

I’ve been traveling somewhat during the last few years, and I wanted to check on a map which countries I already visited. There’s one requirement: I want the whole area of countries I’ve visited to be highlighted. There are a couple of solutions for that: The Elastic stack Data can be stored in ElasticSearch, and there’s one world map visualization available for the Kibana dashboard. This works, but: The visualization handles geo-location, but no highlighting an entire

This is the 4th post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. Inheritance is one of the basic tenet of Object-Oriented Programming, along with encapsulation and polymorphism. Alongside simple inheritance, there is multiple inheritance: feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit characteristics and features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object or class may only inherit from