A couple of years ago, Reactive Programming was all the rage, but it had one big issue: reactive stopped as soon as you accessed a SQL database. You had a nice reactive chain up to the database, defeating the whole purpose. Given the prevalence of SQL databases in existing and new apps, one couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of Reactive Programming but still pay the full price of complexity. Since then, the landscape has changed tremendously.

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.

As junior Java developers, we learn very early in our career about the JDBC API. We learn it’s a very important abstraction because it allows to change the underlying database in a transparent manner.

This is the 3rd post in the Hibernate hard facts focus series. In the third article of this serie, I will show how to tweak Hibernate so as to convert any database data types to and from any Java type so as to decouple your database model from your object model.