Photo credit My dad likes to say that cooking is another form of creativity - part art, part science - that produces something physical, edible, and enjoyable with the chef’s unique style. Programming can be similar (minus the edible part). To learn to cook, you can take classes or read books, but the best teacher is rolling up your sleeves and experimenting yourself. When should you choose this utensil or that?

Photo credit We are still in the beginning stages of building microservices with Java, but we have already seen how to send and receive communications between two Spring Boot applications. In the first blog post of this series, our two applications transmitted a message string of "Hello, World!". In the second blog post, we took it one step further by embedding a MongoDB database into our service1, added a data domain (books) with four pre-populated entries, and transmitted the Book information between the two applications.

Photo credit In my last blog post, we began building microservices in Java with two Spring Boot applications, passing a "Hello, World!" string from one application to the other. We focused on reduced complexity, minimum previous knowledge, and few components. Next, we can slowly add pieces that simulate microservices projects in the real world. One way to do this is by adding a data domain. Applications often model some scenario in the real world such as maintaining office building temperatures, finding connected devices on a network, or recommending a tv show.

Photo credit Microservices have been used and deployed in businesses and projects for awhile, and there is plenty of content available for architecting them into a system. For my next project, I want to dive into the world of microservices and begin building my own little virtual empire from different kinds of services to find out the complexities, best practices, power, and trouble that comes with them. I will share all my learnings along the way, as well.

Photo credit Earlier this year, I received a new work laptop with the recent Apple silicon chip (versus Intel chip). The new M1 has been critically examined with avid enthusiasm and criticism, so I wasn’t sure what my outcome would be. Thus far, it’s been positive, and I really haven’t noticed too much disruption in my work. Things have been faster, but I’m not sure whether to entirely attribute that new chip itself, or just the new machine, in general.

Photo credit *Updated Dec 16, 2021 I created a demo project a couple of years ago that included a lot of technical setup - containers, data import, queries, and such. I presented it for a conference or two, and while it was one of my favorite projects, it was a lot of preparation for the live demo. I recently rediscovered the project, and submitted it to a couple of conferences.

Photo credit You may have heard quite a bit of buzz around reactive programming or reactive principles in recent months or years. Some people say it is the future, while others prefer their existing monoliths. So what is all the fuss actually about? What is reactive? Is it beneficial? As with all things in life, it depends. :) Remember, that technical decisions are often large investments of time - resources to create it and/or maintain for lengths of time.

Photo credit I’ve recently been playing around with a JDK data set that details the historical library changes of the versions of Java, and with the release of Java 17 today (September 14!), I thought it would be a good time to explore this data set a bit more with others. I invite you to join me and to continue with additional exploration and projects! The data set is pulled from a Marc Hofman’s Github repository for the Java Almanac that also feeds a web browser version for the javaalmanac.

Photo credit Our previous post (Part 1) on this topic introduced us to Spring Data Neo4j and showed the architectural differences between version 5 and the latest version 6. This post begins the migration process by taking a Spring Data Neo4j 5 application with OGM and upgrades to the dependencies and syntax changes of Spring Data Neo4j 6. Without further ado, let’s dive in! Current application overview The code for today’s migration is a specific branch in the migration Github repository.