Weekly Links: December 21, 2020

Java

How Netflix Scales its API with GraphQL Federation

One article, two hot topics: Netflix & GraphQL. To be honest, at the end of 2020, I rather forget why Netflix was so hot these last couple of months… Anyhow, many developers like to find out how the “big guys” solve particular problems. You’re in luck: Find out how GraphQL makes internal Netflix APIs better! If that’s your cup of tea, you can also read part 2.

Tools

mvnd: Maven’s Speed Daemon

Gradle has a daemon. That gives us faster builds. Now two-thirds of all developers use Maven. So they have slower builds. Not anymore! Today, we witness the birth of the Maven daemon. Ok, it’s in its infancy and not part of the regular Maven project. But it’s already 3.7 - 26 times faster than plain Maven. So here’s hoping that the Maven project welcomes this daemon with open arms! Well, that sounded better in my head…

Over the Fence

25 Years of JavaScript and Java!

Yep, JavaScript also turned 25 this year, just like Java. Unlike Java, it took just ten days to create the first JavaScript version. That explains a lot! Brendan Eich wrote that first version at Netscape. So these guys gave us the browser and JavaScript!

Releases

Eclipse IDE 2020-12

The “Leading Open Platform for Professional Developers” has its fourth release this year. What’s new for us Java guys? It supports Java 15 and Junit 5.7. And we get “new cleanups for code optimization, quick assists for new constructs and improved defaults for content assist preferences”. A bonus for Mac users: The light theme is now white instead of grey, and the “System” theme uses Mac theme colors.

What’s not new? Eclipse is still short on tech writers:

• Marketing 101: Sell benefits, not features. Yet, three out of nine release highlights aren’t user benefits (“Community-powered”, “Proven extensibility”, “Extensible generic unit test view”).
• “New & Noteworthy” is still a mess of 24 “What’s new” links from various Eclipse projects. They were somehow picked from the list of all the 73 participating projects.

Hm, maybe Eclipse is spending all its money on its move to Belgium these days?

Spring Tools 4.9.0

Hot on the heels of the Eclipse release comes a new release of Spring Tools. And yes, it does work with the new Eclipse release, Visual Studio Code, and the “Eclipse in a browser” project Theia. Spring Tools now requires Java 11 and ships with Java 15. What else is new? Not much, it seems:

• We can now see performance metrics for bean startup and request mapping in live hovers & code lenses.
• And if you’re a poor schmuck who still uses Spring XML config files, then you now have content-assist for constructor-arg names — whatever that means.