Java 21 & GraalVM — lots to be excited about

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

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Today, Java 21 has reached General Availability (GA) with some important new features in the language mainstream (i.e., not requiring preview flags enabled), and Oracle will be supporting Java 21 as a Long long-term support (guaranteed at least 3years of free support (2years to the next LTS + 1 yr overlap) and then for at least an additional 5 years under support subscription). Everyone is talking about virtual threads. Interestingly the new virtual threads mean, in the majority of cases, we no longer need to handle the complexities of reactive programming – not my point of view, but a view expressed earlier today by Tomas Langer, the architect for Helidon. For old hands like myself – this is a blessing as the old-style threading comes more naturally. There are a lot of other smaller features coming through in the language with this, such as records, Z Garbage Collector, and better support for Key Encapsulation management. All the fine details can be found on the Oracle Java blog.

Java.dev has a new Playground, which allows you to write some Java code in the browser and run it. No local JDK or IDE is needed. Great for trying out code, like pattern matching for switch statements.

GraalVM gets a new release with Java 21. Along with some other cool features. Including being able to deploy Graal’s polyglot features with just the support for the languages you want, meaning that the GraalVM footprint is kept as small as you need in containers. This decoupling is supported with Maven and Gradle configurations. With this are enhancements for the Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) performance – read more about this in Alina Yurenko‘s blog.

Who is Claude Shannon?

30 Wednesday Aug 2023

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Anyone in IT will have heard of Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee. The majority of developers will know about Ada Lovelace. But what about Claude Shannon? Well, I have to admit that I didn’t until I had time to watch the documentary film The Bit Player. I am shocked I’d never come across Shannon’s name before, given the importance of his work.

So what did he do? Well, Claude was responsible for Information Theory, which some people will have heard of. His MIT thesis set the foundations for Boolean algebra and the use of switches to manage data. He published a couple of really important papers in the 1940s. The most important of these is the Mathematical Theory of Communication put forward a number of ideas:

  • All means of communication can be reduced to a logical representation:
  • Representation of information using bits
  • To optimize communication, we should compress data – and compression allows us to reduce the data to just enough before it becomes unintelligible. This is best illustrated by the fact we can write messages and omit characters and sometimes whole words and still be understood.
  • We can use mathematical formulas to determine and correct data corruption due to noise – using techniques such as checksums and error correction.
  • There is an upper limit to how much information can be communicated – now referred to as Shannon’s limit

While this may seem obvious today, in the 1940s, computers were still electromechanical – making it groundbreaking. Claude’s later work may not have been seen as seismic as these initial papers. But in the 50s, he demonstrated with basic telephone switches and magnets the underlying ideas of machine learning using a robotic mouse called Theseus who had to navigate a maze (read more here). Illustrated ideas of how to computationally beat chess masters, which is what eventually happened with IBM’s Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov.

It’s a lovely documentary film, which includes reconstructed interviews with Claude that happened in the 80s. Sadly, Shannon died in 2001 from Alzheimer’s, possibly the cruelest of illnesses for such an insightful and intelligent person,

If you’d like to know more about Shannon – then have a read of this paper. The film The Bit Player can be found on several streaming services and YouTube, and the film’s website is here.

Visualizing A Career Path

02 Wednesday Aug 2023

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I recently wrote a piece for DZone about visualizing career paths. As an enabler for people to make use of the diagrams to help the visualization, we’ve made the original PowerPoint diagrams used available here:

SimpleOrgDownload

Update

We’re excited to hear we’ve had another DZone article selected to be used on the homepage …

Architectural governance – decision matrices as way to reduce friction

24 Monday Jul 2023

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When it comes to software delivery processes, governance processes such as architectural governance boards can often be perceived as a hold-up to software delivery processes, so when a project is slipping against its forecast timelines, such processes can become the easy thing to blame (along with any other process that engages beyond the project team). Sometimes, the slip is happening for very good and legitimate reasons in these situations it is just very hard to defend the slip.

There are a number of things we can do, to simplify and streamline the process. One of these is the use of decision matrices – something I’ve written about in the past (Decision Matrix aka ‘Stress Test’ as a vehicle to make decisions easier). The value of the decision matrix when it comes to governance is that it can be used as a catalog of pre-approved solution approaches. Let’s give an example; we could provide a decision matrix to select the best type of application server, which perhaps covers whether a micro profile framework is used and which ones (e.g., Helidon but not Payara because of the support agreements in place) vs. J2EE (and again reflecting decisions relating implementations such as WebLogic but not WebSphere). Then when a team decides on the implementation or developing a roadmap, if they are working within the matrix’s guidance, then the decision could be approved on the spot by any member of the governance team. With the approval given by just checking the approach being adopted is sensible.

TOGAF – governance perspective

If the solution falls outside of the decision matrices recommendations, this comes down to one of the following reasons:

  • The approach represents a good approach that could and should be applied within the domain but not yet captured in the matrices – therefore, the matrix needs updating.
  • The solution makes sense and follows common industry strategies and/or tools but is addressing an outlier/anomalous situation for this organization – therefore should go to governance seeking a dispensation on this basis. In this situation, it is would beneficial for the designer(s) to highlight the case for dispensation. By highlighting how the existing decision options do not fit. In effect, sharing the assessment of the relevant matrix(ices) against the problem.
  • The approach reflects the development team’s preferences rather than perhaps aligning with the organization’s needs for the ability to maintain technologies. For example, keeping development language in use to the top 5 commonly used languages according to TIOBE rather than adopting a niche language such as Haskell or avoiding languages that have a reputation for being difficult to maintain, such as Perl. In these situations, a careful examination of the case is needed by any governance process.

What we are effectively doing is making the decision matrix not only a tool to help developers select the most effective options (given the ability to standardize approaches raises the chance of possible code reuse or refactoring to reuse) to being a way to lighten governance, or the perception of governance. Whatever mechanism is used to record decisions by a team just has to reference the decision matrices.

Road to Kubernetes – MEAP book review

22 Thursday Jun 2023

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One of the benefits of being a Manning author is that we get access to the Manning book catalog, including those currently in the MEAP early access programme (MEAP). The Road to Kubernetes title was bought to my attention. The book has just become available as a MEAP title; this means that the book has just completed its first major review milestone, and about a third of the book has been written. It does mean our review only covers the first 3 chapters at the moment.

What got my attention with this book is that unlike other titles about Kubernetes \9of which there are a number of great titles in the Manning portfolio already) is that it has adopted a different approach.

Most books focus on one technology and deep dive into that technology and dig into the more advanced features of that specific area. For an experienced IT person, that is great. But, when it comes to Kubernetes, if you’re skills are largely just focused on largely coding with languages like Java, Python, and JavaScript – not unusual for a graduate or junior developers it means the amount of reading and learning curve to get to grips with developing and deploying containers to Kubernetes is considerable. Here, Justin has taken the approach of assuming basic development skills and then taking you on a journey of focussing on the basics of containers, deployment automation, and then Kubernetes with just enough to be able to deploy a simple solution using good practices. This makes the learning path to gaining the skills that allow you to work within a team and building containerized solutions a lot easier.

I imagine once the book is complete and you’ve followed it through, you’ll be in a position to focus on learning new, more advanced aspects of containers and Kubernetes in a focused manner to meet the needs of a day-to-day job.

Having coached and mentored junior developers and graduates, this is a book I’d recommend to help them along, and if my experience with the Manning book development process is anything to go by, as Justin goes through the major milestones, this book will go from good to great.

My only word of caution is that this book will take the reader on a journey of building and deploying microservices to Kubernetes. Don’t be fooled into thinking Kubernetes and microservices are easy – there is a lot of technologies that I don’t think the book will go into (but then not all developers need to understand details such the differences in network fabric (Calico, Flannel) or container engines cri-o, Docker Engine, deploying support tooling for things like observability). Without good design and, depending upon your solution, a handle in a variety of more specialized areas, it is still possible to get yourself into a mess, even for the most experienced of teams.

DZone article – IDE Changing as Fast as Cloud Native

12 Monday Jun 2023

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While this might be my home for sharing thoughts and knowledge, my domain name can work against me when it comes to new potential readers (once people have found me – it’s a fairly easy domain name to remember and get back to). That does mean I occasionally write and publish content elsewhere (Software Engineering Daily, and Medium, for example). I’ve recently written a couple of posts on DZone, the latest of which looks at how IDEs have evolved.

Today we’ve just heard that the article is on the DZone homepage (top left in the image below). If you’re a bit old school, it feels like we’ve made the front page of the national press (for the really old, it would be fair to say as a More Articles piece, it is ‘below the fold’). Go check it out here.

Simplifying the escaping of JSON strings

08 Thursday Jun 2023

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when you’re testing apps, it is pretty common to want to send JSON via CURL to a local endpoint. The problem is that this usually means that the string you provide curl needs to have characters escaped, such as quote marks. By hand, this can be irritating to sort out, particularly if you’re using an IDE to make sure the JSON is correct. I’d concluded this is hardly a new problem; someone must have produced a nice little multiple-platform command line utility that can do it for you. The result was a bit more surprising.

There are plenty of online utils that solve it, but if you’re working with data, you don’t want to publicly share (or the fiddling around with copy-pasting to your browser). Nothing wrong with these tools, but you can’t script them without resorting to RPA (Robotic Process Automation) either. Here are a couple of services I found that are straightforward, and when I’ve tried them, not plagued by annoying ads.

But finding command line tools, well, finding an answer, has proven a bit more challenging. For removing escaped characters, you could use jq, but we actually want to go the other way to use curl with JSON that has been escaped. I have come across conversations covering the use of bash (making use of awk and sed. Plus, details about how the manipulation could be done in various languages (so you could code your own solution if so inclined. Coding is unlikely to take much effort, but testing permutations is going to demand effort).

The one solution I have found that meant I could escape (or reverse) JSON locally is a plugin for VS Code called appropriately JSON-escaper, which does what is needed in a nice and clean manner. All credit to Joshua Poehls for the tool.

The solution JSON-escaper built on top of a more generic JavaScript utility which addresses escaping special characters which can be found here.

Bucharest Tech Week Conference – Monoliths in a Microservices World

29 Monday May 2023

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Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present at the Software Architecture Summit as part of the Bucharest Tech Week conference. My presentation, Monoliths in a Microservice World, was all new content that, by chance, worked well, bringing together a number of points made by other speakers. The presentation aimed at the challenges of adopting Microservices and whether Monoliths had a place in modern IT, and for those of us not fortunate enough to be working for one of the poster children for microservices like Netflix, Amazon, etc, how we can get our existing monoliths playing nicely with microservices.

The conference may not have the size of Devoxx (yet), but it certainly had quality with presenters from globally recognized organizations such as Google (Abdelkfettah Sghiouar), Thoughtworks (Arne Lapõnin), Vodafone (IT Services business unit – _VOIS – Stefan Ciobanu), Bosch, as well as subsidiaries of companies like DXC (Luxsoft) and rapid growth SaaS vendor LucaNet.

As a presenter, you’re always wanting to walk the tightrope of being at the biggest conferences to maximize reach for your message while at the same time wanting the experience to be friendly and personable, which often means slightly smaller conferences. The Software Architecture Summit balanced that really well; rather than lots of smaller breakout sessions, the conference focussed on a single auditorium for a large number of attendees, with presentation slots varying in length depending upon the subject matter. If a session didn’t interest you, then there were plenty of exhibitors to talk with – although, from what I saw, the auditorium was full during the sessions, reflecting the interest in the content.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – John F. Woods

Quote of the conference – as cited by @DevPaco (Paco van Beckhoven)

The conference organizers (Universum) certainly put in the effort to ensure the presenters were looked after. It is the little touches that really make the difference, such as taking care of logistics which can be as simple as organizing airport transfers. A letter of thanks will be waiting for you at the hotel after the event, organizing a meal for the presenters at a local restaurant and so on.

Continue reading →

SSH Key File Permissions

22 Monday May 2023

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Permissions on ssh key files on Windows can be rather annoying. If you try to use ssh it will protest about the permissions and will stop the secure connection. On Linux, it is easy to modify the permissions with a chmod command (chmod 700 *.key).

Update

Since originally writing this blog post, we came across a cmd (.bat) script that can alter the file permissions for Windows 10 and later (the basis of the script can be found here). With this script’s directory in the PATH variable, we can call it anywhere with the command protect-key.bat my-key-file.key, and it will correct the permissions accordingly.

View Code

To overcome the permissions issues, we need to make several changes to the file’s security properties to apply the following changes:

  • Switch off inheritance using the Disable inheritance button (images 1 and 2 below)
  • Remove grants to user groups other than Administrators (image 3)
  • Remove users who do not needing access is recommended.
Advanced security tab on Windows
Disable security inheritance
Remove Groups from permissions

The following image shows the ideal end state:

Ideal end state for permissions

Free Information Security Book

11 Thursday May 2023

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Apress has made one of their InfoSec books freely available in EBook format here. It isn’t the most up-to-date text, but it does deal with a lot of the ideas, principals45, and issues rather than low-down detailed specifics, meaning it still holds a lot of relevance today (e.g. Social Engineering4), Cryptography, Malware, etc). So if you want an easy starter read into this space that’s free you can’t go wrong with this.