Java

Many developers were burned by the overly complex world of Java back in the early 2000s. The Gang of Four patterns and middleware / J2EE / Java EE led to ridiculous levels of alleged decoupling as is evident in this sequence diagram from an open source J2EE ecommerce system I worked on in 2002:

Back in 2014 I wrote about how things had changed: Java Doesn’t Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong.  But six years have passed since I wrote that and things have continued to improve, making the Java platform a fantastic option when building microservices, data pipelines, web apps, mobile apps, and more.  Let’s walk through some of the “modern” (as of 2021) aspects to the Java platform.

Broadly speaking there are two types of integrations with Salesforce, either a system-to-system integration or a user interface integration. One of the primary ways to do these integrations is by using the Salesforce REST API. When using the Salesforce REST API you need to obtain an access token that identifies who is making the requests. OAuth 2 provides an HTTP interface to obtain a Salesforce access token.

When using the Salesforce OAuth 2 API there are three options for obtaining an access token:

Great developer experiences allow you go from nothing to something amazing in under ten minutes. So I’m always trying to see how much I can minimize getting started experiences. My latest attempt is to deploy a Spring Boot app on Heroku, download the source to a developer’s machine, setup & run the app locally, make & test changes, and then redeploy those changes — all in under ten minutes (assuming a fast internet connection). Here is that experience in about six minutes:

Recently I blogged about a toolchain that quickly gets you going with the Salesforce REST APIs. I believe developers should be able to get started with new technologies without having to install tons of stuff and struggle for days. That blog used Quick Force Node for those who want to use JavaScript / Node.js. I’ve had a number of requests for a Java version of this toolchain so I created Quick Force Java.

Salesforce provides a variety of different ways to integrate external apps into the Salesforce UI. Canvas is an iframe-based approach for loading externally hosted UIs into pages on Salesforce. The nice thing about Canvas versus a plain iframe is that Canvas has a JavaScript bridge which enables secure communication between the external iframe and Salesforce. This communication happens in the context of the Salesforce user and doesn’t require the typical OAuth handshake. Because Canvas apps live outside of Salesforce they can be built with any language and run anywhere, including Heroku.

I’ve been building enterprise Java web apps since servlets were created. In that time the Java ecosystem has changed a lot but sadly many enterprise Java developers are stuck in some very painful and inefficient ways of doing things. In my travels I continue to see Java The Sucky Parts - but it doesn’t have to be that way. It is time for enterprises to move past the sucky ways they are using the Java platform. Here is a list of the suckiest parts of Java that I see most often and some recommendations for how to move past them.

Next week I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Boulder and Denver Java User Groups. Here is the session description:

Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets. You will also learn how the actor model in Akka pairs well with lambdas to create an event-driven foundation that provides concurrency, clustering and fault-tolerance.

Tonight I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Triangle Java Users Group. Here is the session description:

Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets. You will also learn how the actor model in Akka pairs well with lambdas to create an event-driven foundation that provides concurrency, clustering and fault-tolerance.

Tonight (Feburary 21, 2013) I will be presenting at the Utah JUG about Client/Server Apps with Play Framework, HTML5 and Java. Here is the session description:

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around, the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented.

This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter, Bootstrap, and some CoffeeScript to build the Client. The Server could be anything that talks HTTP, but this session will use the Play Framework.

Tomorrow (December 12, 2012) I will be presenting in Dallas at the JavaMUG about Client/Server Apps with Play Framework, HTML5 and Java. Here is the session abstract:

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around, the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented.

This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter, Bootstrap, and some CoffeeScript to build the Client. The Server could be anything that talks HTTP, but this session will use the Play Framework.