Reasoning about a program’s behavior is extremely tricky in the best of circumstances. When you throw in asynchronicity, it is the absolute worst. It’s like your code is trapped in a convoluted time travel movie. You want to perform some operation, but that requires stepping into a time portal and coming out at some indeterminate future date. Who knows what has changed since you’ve been gone? Add a few more asynchronous operations, and your code very quickly becomes a tangled mess of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Read more on Time and Relative Distance in Source (Code)…
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Exporting a Java Library to a Xamarin.Forms Android Project
The device on our current project has two unique software development kits (one for Android and one for iOS). My team wanted to use Xamarin.Forms to create an application for the device so that the core logic of the app could be stored in one place.
However, in order to also incorporate the platform-specific SDK methods, we had to export Java code (for Android) and Swift code (for iOS) as libraries and then import those libraries into a Xamarin.Forms project. Read more on Exporting a Java Library to a Xamarin.Forms Android Project…
Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 3: Multitenancy
Hello once again! This is Part 3 of a three-part series on extending Dropwizard to have custom authentication, authorization, and multitenancy. In Part 1, we set up custom authentication in Dropwizard, and in Part 2, we extended that to have role-based authorization. For this final part, we are going to diverge slightly and tackle the related but different concept of multitenancy.
Read more on Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 3: Multitenancy…
Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 2: Authorization
Welcome back! This is Part 2 of a three-part series on extending Dropwizard to have custom authentication, authorization, and multitenancy. In Part 1, we set up custom authentication. When we left off, we had just used the Java annotations @RolesAllowed and @PermitAll to authenticate our resource methods, so they will only run for credentialed users. In this part, we’ll cover Dropwizard authorization. We are going to extend the code we added to check the role assigned to a user and further restrict our methods based on whether that matches.
Read more on Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 2: Authorization…
Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 1: Custom Authentication
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on extending Dropwizard with custom authentication, authorization, and multitenancy. For Part 1, we are going to go over adding custom authentication to Dropwizard.
Read more on Dropwizard Deep Dive – Part 1: Custom Authentication…
Unsubscribing from an RxJava Observable Mid-Stream
Imagine a scenario where you need to create an Observable sequence that will acquire a resource, do some processing, and release the resource when unsubscribed from. An example of something like this might be an Observable that acquires a lock and releases it when unsubscribed from. That “lock” signal could be merged with a second signal that does some work that should only be done after the lock has been acquired.
Read more on Unsubscribing from an RxJava Observable Mid-Stream…
Using Hibernate DAOs in DropWizard Tasks
I’ve previously blogged about DropWizard, a Java web framework for developing RESTful web services.
One of Dropwizard’s great features is its ability to easily write and deploy runtime administrative tasks for you application. Read more on Using Hibernate DAOs in DropWizard Tasks…
More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 2
In part 1 of this post I claimed it’s easy to test-drive our way into a poor design. We looked at some techniques for using types with TDD, but the examples were simple. Today I’ll walk through Kent Beck’s Money example showing where the design fails and how it can be improved with types. Read more on More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 2…
More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 1
I learned test-driven development from Kent Beck’s book Test-Driven Development By Example. It’s an excellent introduction that whets the appetite for one of my other favorites, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce.
Both of these books have a blind spot, though: they are completely silent about how modern static type systems might augment or even replace tests. After reading these books, it’s easy to think that “typing” mainly has something to do with keyboards. Read more on More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 1…
Serving Static Assets with DropWizard
Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of work with DropWizard, an awesome Java web framework for developing RESTful web services.
I was recently prototyping a small application, and I wanted to serve static files directly from DropWizard. While this isn’t what DropWizard is primarily designed to do, I didn’t want to go through the process of setting up another web server just to serve static assets for a prototype. While DropWizard has some out-of-the-box support for serving static assets, I found the documentation surrounding it to be incomplete and confusing. It actually took me a couple hours of debugging to figure out how to do exactly what I wanted, So I thought I would document what I learned here.
My end goal was to serve a small single page JavaScript app on the root of my DropWizard application, while having my DropWizard REST endpoints available at /api. The limited documentation around serving assets in DropWizard suggest that setting up an AssetsBundle for / and changing the application context path in your config file should be enough to achieve this, but that did not work for me. I had to do the following steps: Read more on Serving Static Assets with DropWizard…