All posts by Rafał Głowiński

Spring @WebMvcTest with Spock Framework

Spring is one of the most popular JVM-targeted frameworks. One of the reasons why it has become so popular is writing tests. Even before Spring Boot era, it was easy to run an embedded Spring application in tests. With Spring Boot, it became trivial. JUnit and Spock are two most popular frameworks for writing tests. They both provide great support and integration with Spring, but until recently it was not possible to leverage Spring’s @WebMvcTest in Spock. Why does it matter? @WebMvcTest is a type of an integration test that only starts a specified slice of Spring Application and thus its execution time is significantly lower compared to full end-to-end tests. Things have changed with Spock 1.2. Let me show you, how to leverage this new feature.

Meet Retrofit2

In this post I will introduce to you a recently released version of a well known library for consuming RESTful services — Retrofit2. Even though it is mainly targeted at Android platform it works very well on the “server” Java. Its lightness and low garbage generation overhead make it an interesting option if one does not like existing solutions (like Jersey Client, or Spring’s RestTemplate). I will also show how to configure it properly and fully utilize its great RxJava compatibility.

There is more to logging than meets the eye

In this article I will show you that if you want to implement good logging into your application then you should have a strong knowledge of logging API, spend some time considering what and when to log and last but not least: remember that logging is a cost paid in your application’s responsiveness.

Testing RESTful services and their clients

REST (Representational State Transfer) has become very popular over the course of the past few years. It has happened so not only because of growing popularity of lightweight Web frameworks (like Angular.js) but also due to the new Microservice Architecture hype (thank you Netlifx). Frameworks like Spring add new REST-related functionalities with each new release and more and more companies decide to give them a try… But how do you test them - REST services and their clients?

Java Testing Toolbox

Introduction This article is addressed mainly to people who are not very experienced in the area of unit / integration testing although basic knowledge of JUnit is required. I am going to provide you with a quick recap of the most commonly used Java testing tools, starting with JUnit (together with three nice complementary libraries: JUnitParams, catch-exception) and Mockito. Then I will show you how to perform assertions in a much nicer and cleaner way using AssertJ so that you never have to use Hamcrest again.

Rafał Głowiński

Rafał is an experienced software developer who has spent most of his career working in Java and recently got very interested in Kotlin. His areas of interest include code quality assurance, highly scalable, cloud-oriented architectures and all aspects of system’s performance analysis.