How to emulate @CreatedBy and @LastModifiedBy from Spring Data using the @GeneratorType Hibernate annotation
Introduction Hibernate comes with many additions to the standard JPA specification. One such example is the @GeneratorType annotation which allows you to customize the way a given entity property value is automatically generated. If you’re using Spring Data, you can simply use the @CreatedBy and @LastModifiedBy annotations and the annotated entity properties are going to be populated with the currently logged user. If you’re not using Spring Data, then you can easily emulate the same behavior using the Hibernate-specific @GeneratorType annotation and the ValueGenerator callback mechanism.
A beginner’s guide to transaction isolation levels in enterprise Java
Introduction A relational database strong consistency model is based on ACID transaction properties. In this post we are going to unravel the reasons behind using different transaction isolation levels and various configuration patterns for both resource local and JTA transactions. Isolation and consistency In a relational database system, atomicity and durability are strict properties, while consistency and isolation are more or less configurable. We cannot even separate consistency from isolation as these two properties are always related. The lower the isolation level, the less consistent the system will get. From the least… Read More
Spring request-level memoization
Introduction Memoization is a method-level caching technique for speeding-up consecutive invocations. This post will demonstrate how you can achieve request-level repeatable reads for any data source, using Spring AOP only. Spring Caching Spring offers a very useful caching abstracting, allowing you do decouple the application logic from the caching implementation details. Spring Caching uses an application-level scope, so for a request-only memoization we need to take a DIY approach.
The Builder pattern and the Spring framework
Introduction In this article, we are going to see how we can use the Builder pattern when creating beans with the Spring framework. I like to make use of the builder pattern whenever an object has both mandatory and optional properties. But building objects is usually the Spring framework responsibility, so let’s see how you can employ it using both Java and XML-based Spring configurations.
JOOQ Facts: SQL functions made easy
Introduction The JDBC API has always been cumbersome and error-prone and I’ve never been too fond of using it. The first major improvement was brought by the Spring JDBC framework which simply revitalized the JDBC usage with its JdbcTemplate or the SqlFunction classes, to name a few. But Spring JDBC doesn’t address the shortcoming of using string function or input parameters names and this opened the door for type-safe SQL wrappers such as jOOQ. JOOQ is the next major step towards a better JDBC API and ever since I started using it… Read More
Why I like Spring bean aliasing
Spring framework is widely used as a dependency injection container, and that’s for good reasons. First of all, it facilitates integration testing and it gives us the power of customizing bean creation and initialization (e.g. @Autowired for List types). But there is also a very useful feature, that might get overlooked and therefore let’s discuss about bean aliasing. Bean aliasing allows us to override already configured beans and to substitute them with a different object definition. This is most useful when the bean definitions are inherited from an external resource, which is… Read More
Why I like Spring @Autowired for List types
Spring Framework dependency injection is great, and almost every Java developer uses it nowadays. Using @Autowired to inject Java Beans is trivial, but we can also use this annotation for java.util.List, or java.util.Map as well. The former will inject a list of all Java Beans matching the List’s Generic type, while the latter will create a map of these beans mapped by their names. How I’ve been taking advantage of this feature? Since I was developing an application which has a framework module and a specific customer implementation module, there were cases… Read More
