JPA Pitfalls – a Series of Serious JPA Obstacles

| Michael Bouschen

Most of our Java-based web-applications store their data in a relational database such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB or MS SQLServer. The standard way to access and modify the data is using an object-relational mapping as specified by the Java Persistence API (JPA). Over the years JPA has become a mature specification and there are a couple of JPA implementations with strong support such as Hibernate, EclipseLink, OpenJPA and DataNucleus. However, day-to-day project experience demonstrates there are number of pitfalls you might run into when using JPA.

pitfall

To avoid stumbling into the same pitfall again and again, we collected them with their solutions and presented these pairs of problems and solutions. This is a start of a series of blog articles each describing a pitfall and a way to circumvent it.

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Developers Adopt Kotlin! Addressing your fears and Kotlin’s gains.

| Immanuel Sims

Every time I have used Kotlin instead of Java I enjoyed it and did not regret it. But somehow I still meet some reservations regarding Kotlin with both managers and sometimes developers.

This Post will address your fears as a (Java) developer regarding the use of Kotlin and elaborate a bit on what Kotlin will gain you. There is a similar post on this blog addressing managers (German version here) which will probably also be good reading for you.

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Managers adopt Kotlin! Addressing your fears and Kotlin’s gains.

| Immanuel Sims

Every time I have used Kotlin instead of Java I enjoyed it and did not regret it. But somehow I still meet some reservations regarding Kotlin with both managers and sometimes developers.

This post will address your fears as a manager regarding the use of Kotlin and elaborate a bit on what Kotlin will gain you. There will be a similar post on this blog addressing developers that goes a bit more into technical details.

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Angular & OpenId: a real world example

| Immanuel Sims

In theory it appears pretty easy to build the browser side of an application using OpenId Connect. Actually implementing it in a real world application has usually proven to be more difficult than that.

I would like to show you how to solve some of the real world problems beside the basic setup. First let me describe what I want to build:

  • a single page app with Angular
  • routing via the hash part of the url
  • a forced login via OIDC

I will write about the following problems within building that app:

  • What library to choose?
  • Where and when to initialise that library?
  • Angular and hash based routing
  • How to handle errors?
  • Some smaller miscellaneous problems

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Part 1: GraphQL with Spring Boot, JPA and Kotlin

| renekloth

GraphQL is a query language for dynamic queries on linked data. In the GraphQL world, there are many tutorials and documentation that illustrate the concrete introduction to GraphQL. Since getting started requires a lot of explanation, regular tutorials usually have a simple setup, which does not reflect the real world complexity. If additional technologies are added or the complexity of the project increases, these “Hello World” examples are usually no longer so helpful.

This article introduces GraphQL on the technology Spring Boot with JPA and Kotlin. I also present some best practices which I have learned while I have worked with it. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/akquinet/kotlin-spring-graphql

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Unbounded Functional Loops in Kotlin

| tnfink

This article is a follow-up to this previous article about bounded loops. Bounded loops are cool because they always terminate and usually it is pretty easy to estimate the computational time. But as every computer scientist, who had to understand the halting problem, knows, there is a big class of algorithms which are harder. These are known as the class of μ-recursive functions. Here, unbounded loops exists which can run forever. I will introduce how IMHO unbounded loops can be implemented in Kotlin in a functional way. And, of course, I could not resist and did some measurements…

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Conditional evaluation in Docker files

| M. Dahm

In general, a Docker build file (Dockerfile) should be usable on any Docker server. In some cases however, you would like to have something like a conditional ‘IF’ statement in your Dockerfile. To give an example: It is common usage to use apk/apt-get/curl or any other tool in your build that needs to download data from the Internet.
Alas, in some networks the use of a HTTP(S) proxy is mandatory and thus an impediment.

In this article we will show how to run a proxy-agnostic Docker build. The described mechanism is also usable for other circumstances.

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Java Optional and Kotlin Nullable

| Martin Schröder

We are using Kotlin and Spring Boot in one of our projects. This includes Spring Boot Jpa Repositories. We are using a CrudRepository that provides basic functionalities like save(), delete(), findById() etc. This library is written in Java, hence method signatures look like this:

Optional<T> findById(ID var1);

Using this API out of the box would force us to deal with cumbersome Java Optionals. Since we are implementing in Kotlin we would like to use Kotlin Nullables instead and as it turned out we can achieve this very easily.

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