Spring security is great! It gives you the possibility to secure your app and to create a login with a few simple lines of code. However, it could also become annoying during development, when you have to log yourself in again and again. So why not create a mocked Spring authentication for development and testing?

Sometimes Gradle’s bootRun and Window’s command length limit are two opponents. If you use bootRun to start your Spring Boot app from Gradle all class path dependencies will be added to the start command. Gradle will run something like this in the end:

Vagrant is a great tool to provision virtual machines! As I’m a passionated Windows user, Vagrant is the weapon of my choice whenever I need to use some Linux-only tools such as Docker. I spinn up a new Linux VM, already configured with the things I need and start working. However, when it comes to resizing a disk, Vagrant is not nice to you…

Java 8 Optionals

Although Java is an object-oriented language, you will often separate our data and your actual business logic. You will write POJOs, entities, domain models and DTOs which you will pass to services, repositories and controllers. If you do so, you will properly need test data for those objects. Often, the data you pass will be very important as it represents the state of your application and business process. You must design it carefully to get the test results you are looking for. However, there are also some cases where the data isn’t so important - it must just be there! You need an object, filled with random data. That’s it.

URL parameters are an essential part of single page applications. They hold the current state of an application and enable users to open the application in a certain state. Here’s an example:

A database view is a great way to prepare complicated data structures and present it in a more convenient way. We can use database views to map our technical driven database structure (with a lot of tables and foreign keys) to a more business driven structure. This means that we might join tables, concatenate values or just rename the columns, because a particular name suits better to the current business context.

As I was reading about some Mockito features last week, I stumbled over the following tweet, which really made me laugh:

As I’m a passionate Windows user (sorry…), I often use VirtualBox (with Vagrant) to pull up a Linux box to use Docker or some other “Linux-only” stuff. Usually, this works really fine, but today my VirtualBox crashed with a STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND error:

I just stumbled over a post on Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30864466/whats-the-best-way-to-share-files-from-windows-to-boot2docker-vm) with the question how to mount a Windows folder to a Boot2Docker VM. Although the steps are a little bit confusing, in the end it is not difficult to do.