Category: Uncategorized

Spring Boot, HTTPS required, and Elastic Beanstalk health checks

Spring Boot can be very easily configured to require HTTPS for all requests. In application.properties, simply set security.require-ssl=true And that works great – until you’re running the Spring Boot application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with both HTTP and HTTPS listeners: In that case, Elastic Beanstalk’s health check is always done over HTTP. The configuration page … Continue reading Spring Boot, HTTPS required, and Elastic Beanstalk health checks →

Spring Cache Abstraction as a Hibernate Cache Provider

Many of the projects I’ve worked on over my career have leveraged a Spring/Hibernate stack. Over that time, the Spring/Hibernate integration has greatly improved making the once tedious and repetitive chore of setting up a new project (and maintaining an existing one through upgrades, expansion, and refactoring) far simpler. Now it’s as simple as going … Continue reading Spring Cache Abstraction as a Hibernate Cache Provider →

Spring ID to Entity Conversion

When using Spring with Hibernate or JPA, it can be very convenient to use objects as method parameters and automatically convert primary keys to those objects. For example: @RequestMapping(value = "/person/{personId}", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)@ResponseBodypublic PersonDto getById(@PathVariable Person person) { return person;} instead of: @RequestMapping(value = "/person/{personId}", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)@ResponseBodypublic … Continue reading Spring ID to Entity Conversion →

Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Hibernate Cache

When using Ehcache’s ARC (Automatic Resource Control) on a cache acting as the Hibernate cache, these kinds of warning will likely appear: WARN [pool-1-thread-1] [ehcache.pool.impl.DefaultSizeOfEngine] sizeOf The configured limit of 100 object references was reached while attempting to calculate the size of the object graph. This can be avoided by adding stop points with @IgnoreSizeOf … Continue reading Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Hibernate Cache →

Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Thymeleaf Cache

Ehcache’s ARC (Automatic Resource Control) is pretty great – it more or less automatically and optimally handles cache sizing/allocation. Using ARC, one can effectively say, “Here’s 2GB to allocate for caching – no more than that – manage the cache as best as possible.” Of course, more complex rules can also be done (on a … Continue reading Issues using Ehcache with ARC as the Thymeleaf Cache →

Using Spring Cache as the Thymeleaf Cache

Thymeleaf includes caching that can be used to cache templates, fragments, messages, and expressions. The default implementation is an in-memory cache using standard Java collections. Wouldn’t it be nice to use the Spring Cache Abstraction instead? The advantages of such a setup include: Consistency – why have many separate caching implementations each configured in different … Continue reading Using Spring Cache as the Thymeleaf Cache →

Improving Performance of Spring’s ShallowEtagHeaderFilter by 50%

I led the team developing a new web presence for Mackenzie Financial, an effort which involved performance testing (which is always a good practice). During that testing, I discovered that ShallowEtagHeaderFilter was generating a lot of garbage and a lot of time was being spent in it. That didn’t seem ideal so I dove in … Continue reading Improving Performance of Spring’s ShallowEtagHeaderFilter by 50% →

HTTP Response Caching for Java and Android

HTTP caching is both important, as it reduces bandwidth use and improves performance, and complex, as the rules are far from simple. In my experience, most Java and Android applications either don’t do HTTP caching, or they roll their own and up doing it wrong or in way too complicated a fashion. In other words, … Continue reading HTTP Response Caching for Java and Android →