An introduction to the Reactive Programming Paradigm — This is the first part of a series on Reactive programming with Spring WebFlux. Part 2 : An introduction to Spring WebFlux features If you are clueless about what reactive programming is, then you are in the right place. In part 1, we will see the basics of the reactive…

A step-by-step guide to build your first AI Chatbot — IBM Watson is a powerful platform where software developers and non-technical users can co-create AI solutions. Its easy-to-use interface allows you to quickly create an AI model, from simple chatbots to complex enterprise solutions. In this article, we will explore how to create, train and integrate your first Cognitive Virtual…

The hexagonal architecture is replacing the layered style, and here’s why — The Hexagonal Architecture is an architectural pattern for designing software applications. Its popularity has increased in recent years as it is an alternative to a traditional layered architecture. In this article, I explain why hexagonal architecture is replacing layered architecture. What is the problem with layered architecture?

A practical approach to API stubbing and virtualization — In the world of microservices, we as developers need to deal with the complexity of developing services across distributed systems. These microservices are isolated from each other, which has many advantages but also some drawbacks, such as the higher complexity in testing. This complexity in testing can be overcome by…

Start designing user-centered automated acceptance tests for your APIs — The Screenplay Pattern is a design pattern for writing user-centered automated acceptance tests. Based on SOLID principles, this approach encourages good testing habits for the development of well-designed, easy-to-maintain and easy-to-read tests. Setting Up the Project Maven Dependencies To test REST APIs, add the Serenity BDD dependencies to your pom.xml…

Two strategies to map bi-directional relationships between entities — In object-oriented programming, an association is a relationship between two entities that defines how two objects communicate. An association can be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. Bi-directional associations happen when two classes define their relationships with each other symmetrically (symmetrical associations).

A solution for continuous database integration — When working for large organizations, we developers do not usually deploy our own applications. Therefore, we may need to leverage a migration tool to continuously integrate and deploy database schemas along with the rest of the code. In this article, we will explore how migration tools like Liquibase can help…

How to integrate S3 into your Spring Boot Kotlin applications — Many times, we as developers need to deal with large objects such as images, photos, documents, and so on. There are different alternatives available to store these objects: as a binary in the database, or directly on the server file system. …

Develop and test your Spring applications with Google Cloud Spanner — Google Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed relational database service. Using this solution, you can execute ACID transactions and use SQL semantics without compromising horizontal scaling and high availability. In this article, we will go through how to develop and test a Spring Boot Kotlin application using Spanner (for free).