Programming

Frank Neff
28 Mar, 2024

How a Strong Type System Saves You Documentation, Tests, and Nerves

I was recently inspired to finally write this post. Especially in weakly- or untyped languages, such as the JavaScript or PHP world, the added value of strict type systems is often not recognized. Instead, many discussions and comments revolve around the need for tests or code comments. Contrary to that, in the functional programming world, we leave such checks to the compiler. In this post I would like to give a short overview and explain how to use a strict type system for everyday checks instead of writing type checks, tests and documentation for it.

Frank Neff
25 Feb, 2022

Why you probably don't need Spring Cloud Config

Spring cloud config is a configuration management solution and part of the Spring ecosystem. It’s easy to integrate and use, but it has severe downsides from an architectural perspective. Also, I have seen many projects where it was added just because “it is a thing” and even more often, it was used to solve or work around problems in the software architecture or deployment for which it doesn’t provide a real solution. In this blog post, I’ll point out some conceptional issues and downsides of that project I have seen so far.

Frank Neff
26 Feb, 2020

Crossbuilding Scala.js 1.0 and 0.6

As you may know, Scala.js 1.0.0 just went final. For end-products, the upgrade is rather simple, just bump the plugin version and fix potential compile issues. If you’re maintaining a library, cross-building for 0.6.x and 1.0.x is still a bit tricky, but possible…

Frank Neff
14 Dec, 2019

The Spring Security Oauth2 Blues - Simplicity

I personally like the Spring Framework and its security components, because it’s pretty full-featured and easy to use, but when it comes to Spring Security OAuth2, there’s a huge quality breakdown. In this (probably series) of blogposts, I’ll try to sum up the good, the bad, the evil and why I ended up completely dropping Spring Security OAuth2.

Frank Neff
18 Dec, 2017

Java Libs in Scala - A bit more Functional

Every Java library can be used in Scala, which is, for me, one of the good parts of the JVM world. But Java libs are mostly object-oriented and not functional, therefore full of side effects and somtimes “ugly” to use in Scala. But there are some approaches how to make Java libs (or their interfaces) more functional, so they can almost be used like a Scala lib.

Frank Neff
06 Sep, 2017

Overcoming Checked Exceptions in Java Lambdas

In Java 8, the long awaited Lambda came to live, making it easy(-er) to do FP in Java. One problem I came across is, that most Java code throws checked exceptions which leads to IMHO ugly try/catch blocks in lambdas:

Frank Neff
22 Nov, 2016

java
library

Functional Java 1 - Options

This is the first post of my series about functional programming in Java. There’s a lot of functional stuff one can do. Everyone knows the Java 8 Lambda expression, but with a little library support, there is way more… In this series, I’ll coder som libraries which provide functional paradigms and constructs for Java:

Frank Neff
02 May, 2016

Play Framework Actor Pooling with Guice (Java)

Working with the Play! Framework means working with Akka, intentionally or not. But working with Akka Actors can be tricky, especially when it comes to dependency injection. Play! 2.4 uses Google’s Guice for DI and of course it has the ability to also bind Actors so an ActorRef can be injected anywhere.

Frank Neff
23 Jul, 2015

Understanding Stemmers (Natural Language Processing)

I am interested in NLP and have already some experience with Apache Solr. It’s time to dig a little in-deep regarding stemmers. First of all, I was looking for a general definition of what a stemmer is, and I found this one, which IMHO is quite good:

stemmer — an algorithm for removing inflectional and derivational endings in order to reduce word forms to a common stem

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