Brian Demers

Writing quality code takes practice. To write better code, you need to know what should improve. Code quality and what makes code easy to read are very subjective; ask five different developers, you will get six different answers. For this post, I’ll avoid most of the subjective and focus on ways to detect real issues and potential bugs.

There has been much buzz about GraalVM and what it means for the Java world. GraalVM is a Java distribution from Oracle that adds a bunch of features, most notably a new JIT compiler, polyglot capabilities, an LLVM runtime… and the ability to turn your Java application into a native binary.

This last one offers the potential to distribute Java applications as a single binary, and a few frameworks like Quarkus, Helidon, and Micronaut already take advantage of this feature. Native images also open up the possibility to distribute Java applications as CLI applications, which has recently been the near-exclusive domain of Go and Node. This tutorial will show you how!

How many times have you started a new job, and the first thing you see on the company intranet is a “Your connection is not private” error message? Maybe you asked around and were directed to a wiki page. Of course, you probably had to click through the security warnings before actually viewing that page. If you are security-minded, this probably bothers you, but because you have a new job to do, you accept the warning and proceed to jump through the hoops of installing the certificate.

This screencast walks you through creating JWTs with the Java library JJWT.

Apache Maven is still the most popular build tool in the Java space, thanks to the popularity of its ecosystem of plugins. It’s easy to find an existing plugin to do almost anything your application needs, from ensuring your source files have license headers, to validating binary compatibility between versions. Occasionally though, you need to write a custom plugin to fulfill a requirement in your product.