Java Weekly #1: CDI, Java8, Bean Validation and more...

CDI

Are you familiar with CDI events? Really?

Well, then you might skip the beginning of the article You think you know everything about CDI events… Think again! by Antoine Sabot-Durand. He gives a great overview about how CDI events work and their (current) drawbacks. And he gives a small sneak peak at the changes we can expect with CDI 2.0.

This is by far the best overview about CDI events I have read so far. Everyone who is using them, should have a look at it.

The Apache DeltaSpike team released version 1.0 this week. You can find the release notes here and a short overview about the different modules in this posting by Rafael Benevides.

DeltaSpike looks really interesting and seems to provide several features I have missed or found quite complicated to implement. I have never used it so far, but I am planning to change that. If anyone of you has some real world experience with it, please write a comment. I love to hear about it.

Java 8

Oleg Shelajev takes a critical look at the usage of default methods introduced with Java 8. His main point is, that the usage of default methods can make it really difficult to understand your code. If you combine default methods of different interfaces with inheritance, it can become really difficult to find which method implementation will be executed. Therefore, you should think carefully before using default methods everywhere. Quiet often you can use inheritance to get to the same result.
I really liked his post. It is tempting to use new features as often as possible. But we always need to be aware of possible drawbacks. And a loss of readability and an increased complexity of our code can be a massive drawback if you or one of your colleagues has to change or analyze the code.



If you are looking for more information and learning resources about Java 8, you should have a look at Java 8 Friday: The Best Java 8 Resources – Your Weekend is Booked over at the jooq blog.

Bean Validation

Emmanuel Bernard gives with his posting Blah vs Bean Validation: you missed the point like Mars Climate Orbiter a nice response to a post by Julien Tournay. Julien compared the Play Unified Validation API with Bean Validation and prefered the Scala solution for several reasons.
As expected, Emmanuel did not agree with it :) His response is fun to read and very informative. You should not miss it!

Gradle

If you are new to gradle, you should have a look at this multi-part tutorial by Petri Kainulainen:

• Getting Started with Gradle: Introduction
• Getting Started with Gradle: Our First Java Project

He shows how to setup gradle in the first part and how to use it to create a simple java project in the second part of his tutorial.

This and that...

OK, that has to be enough technical stuff for this week. But I also found two not so technical resources I want to share with you. Have a look:

Erik Dietrich tells in The Zen of Rejection: Let Companies Go In That Other Direction a great story about his experience with job interviews and the bad feelings after getting rejected. This is really a great read and he describes a nice way to get your head up again after being rejected.


You should definitely have a look at the slideshare presentation Death by PowerPoint - Redesigned by Ikedinekpere Chiz before you prepare your next presentation. These slides are impressive and tell you how to create a better presentation for your next talk or meeting.

Done!

That were the most interesting resources I found during this week. I hope you find them useful.

If you think I missed something, please post a comment with the link. I will check it and include it in the next edition of my Java Weekly.