Aug 18, 2020
Introducing JmFrX: A Bridge From JMX to JDK Flight Recorder
I’m excited to share the news about an open-source utility I’ve been working on lately: JmFrX, a tool for capturing JMX data with JDK Flight Recorder.
When using JMX (Java Management Extensions), The Java platform’s standard for monitoring and managing applications, JmFrX allows you to periodically record the attributes from any JMX MBean into JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) files, which you then can analyse using JDK Mission Control (JMC).
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Jul 29, 2020
How I Built a Serverless Search for My Blog
I have built a custom search functionality for this blog, based on Java and the Apache Lucene full-text search library, compiled into a native binary using the Quarkus framework and GraalVM. It is deployed as a Serverless application running on AWS Lambda, providing search results without any significant cold start delay. If you thought Java wouldn’t be the right language for this job, keep reading; in this post I’m going to give an overview over the implementation of this feature and my learnings along the way.
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Jun 11, 2020
Building Class Data Sharing Archives with Apache Maven
Ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) is the big topic in the Java ecosystem lately: by compiling Java code to native binaries, developers and users benefit from vastly improved start-up times and reduced memory usage. The GraalVM project made huge progress towards AOT-compiled Java applications, and Project Leyden promises to standardize AOT in a future version of the Java platform.
This makes it easy to miss out on significant performance improvements which have been made on the JVM in recent Java versions, in particular when it comes to faster start-up times. Besides a range of improvements related to class loading, linking and bytecode verification, substantial work has been done around class data sharing (CDS). Faster start-ups are beneficial in many ways: shorter turnaround times during development, quicker time-to-first-response for users in coldstart scenarios, cost savings when billed by CPU time in the cloud.
With CDS, class metadata is persisted in an archive file, which during subsequent application starts is mapped into memory. This is faster than loading the actual class files, resulting in reduced start-up times. When starting multiple JVM processes on the same host, read-only archives of class metadata can also be shared between the VMs, so that less memory is consumed overall.
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May 14, 2020
Single Message Transformations - The Swiss Army Knife of Kafka Connect
Do you remember Angus "Mac" MacGyver? The always creative protagonist of the popular 80ies/90ies TV show, who could solve about any problem with nothing more than a Swiss Army knife, duct tape, shoe strings and a paper clip?
The single message transformations (SMTs) of Kafka Connect are almost as versatile as MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife:
How to change the timezone or format of date/time message fields?
How to change the topic a specific message gets sent to?
How to filter out specific records?
SMTs can be the answer to these and many other questions that come up in the context of Kafka Connect. Applied to source or sink connectors, SMTs allow to modify Kafka records before they are sent to Kafka, or after they are consumed from a topic, respectively.
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May 4, 2020
The Emitter Parameter Pattern for Flexible SPI Contracts
For libraries and frameworks it’s a common requirement to make specific aspects customizeable via service provider interfaces (SPIs): contracts to be implemented by the application developer, which then are invoked by framework code, adding new or replacing existing functionality.
Often times, the method implementations of such an SPI need to return value(s) to the framework. An alternative to return values are "emitter parameters": passed by the framework to the SPI method, they offer an API for receiving value(s) via method calls. Certainly not revolutionary or even a new idea, I find myself using emitter parameters more and more in libraries and frameworks I work on. Hence I’d like to discuss some advantages I perceive about the emitter parameter pattern.
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Apr 21, 2020
Plug-in Architectures With Layrry and the Java Module System
Making applications extensible with some form of plug-ins is a very common pattern in software design: based on well-defined APIs provided by the application core, plug-ins can customize an application’s behavior and provide new functionality. Examples include desktop applications like IDEs or web browsers, build tools such as Apache Maven or Gradle, as well as server-side applications such as Apache Kafka Connect, a runtime for Kafka connectors plug-ins.
In this post I’m going to explore how the Java Platform Module System's notion of module layers can be leveraged for implementing plug-in architectures on the JVM. We’ll also discuss how Layrry, a launcher and runtime for layered Java applications, can help with this task.
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Mar 29, 2020
Introducing Layrry: A Launcher and API for Modularized Java Applications
One of the biggest changes in recent Java versions has been the introduction of the module system in Java 9. It allows to organize Java applications and their dependencies in strongly encapsulated modules, utilizing explicit and well-defined module APIs and relationships.
In this post I’m going to introduce the Layrry open-source project, a launcher and Java API for executing modularized Java applications. Layrry helps Java developers to assemble modularized applications from dependencies using their Maven coordinates and execute them using module layers. Layers go beyond the capabilities of the "flat" module path specified via the --module-path parameter of the java command, e.g. allowing to use multiple versions of one module within one and the same application.
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Mar 16, 2020
Reworking Git Branches with git filter-branch
Within Debezium, the project I’m working on at Red Hat, we recently encountered an "interesting" situation where we had to resolve a rather difficult merge conflict. As others where interested in how we addressed the issue, and also for our own future reference, I’m going to give a quick run down of the problem we encountered and how we solved it.
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Jan 29, 2020
Monitoring REST APIs with Custom JDK Flight Recorder Events
The JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is an invaluable tool for gaining deep insights into the performance characteristics of Java applications. Open-sourced in JDK 11, JFR provides a low-overhead framework for collecting events from Java applications, the JVM and the operating system.
In this blog post we’re going to explore how custom, application-specific JFR events can be used to monitor a REST API, allowing to track request counts, identify long-running requests and more. We’ll also discuss how the JFR Event Streaming API new in Java 14 can be used to export live events, making them available for monitoring and alerting via tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
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Jan 20, 2020
Enforcing Java Record Invariants With Bean Validation
Record types are one of the most awaited features in Java 14; they promise to "provide a compact syntax for declaring classes which are transparent holders for shallowly immutable data". One example where records should be beneficial are data transfer objects (DTOs), as e.g. found in the remoting layer of enterprise applications. Typically, certain rules should be applied to the attributes of such DTO, e.g. in terms of allowed values.
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