Engineering With Java: Digest #62

Spring Boot schema checks, row-level security, multidimensional arrays, OpenAI moderation integration, polyglot programming with GraalVM, and Spring 7’s programmatic bean registration.

Welcome to this week’s edition! I hope you all are having a great time. We have summarized this week’s Java and Spring Boot updates in a 5-minute summary.

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📝 Articles Of The Week (7)

1. Java 21 Virtual Threads vs Cached and Fixed Threads - Java 21 brings virtual threads, a lightweight concurrency model. Unlike OS-backed threads, they scale effortlessly to millions of tasks. The JVM transparently manages blocking/unblocking, freeing carrier threads.

2. Schema Version Checks at Spring Boot Startup - Spring Boot can validate database schema versions at startup using tools like Flyway or Liquibase.This ensures mismatches are caught early, preventing runtime errors and unsafe deployments.

3. Row Level Security in Spring Boot Data Access Layers - Row-level security in Spring Boot can be enforced by tying user context to data filters in repositories, JPA specs, or Hibernate filters.It ensures access control is handled at the data layer, preventing scattered and error-prone checks in controllers.

4. Taking Java Arrays to Another Dimension - Java’s JVM uses specialized bytecodes—anewarray for single-dimensional object arrays, and multi-anewarray for multidimensional object arrays—while primitive multidimensional arrays are built using combinations of newarray and anewarray.

5. A Guide to OpenAI’s Moderation Model in Spring AI - Spring AI integrates seamlessly with OpenAI's Moderation model—allowing you to flag potentially harmful content (e.g., self-harm, hate, sexual content, violence, illicit behavior) at startup or runtime.

6. Polyglot Applications – Running Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby Together Seamlessly - Explores how GraalVM enables seamless integration of Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby within a single application runtime. It highlights the benefits of polyglot programming, such as improved performance and simplified development, by allowing direct inter-language communication without the overhead of traditional inter-process communication.

7. Programmatic Bean Registration Mechanism With BeanRegistrar in Spring - Spring 7’s BeanRegistrar allows programmatic bean registration, offering a flexible alternative to @Bean methods.It supports configuration of bean names, scopes, and lazy initialization, and works natively with Kotlin via BeanRegistrarDsl.

▶️ Videos Of The Week (3)

1. Ahead-of-Time Computation in Java 25 - Leverages Project Leyden in JDK 25 to speed up Java application startup and warm-up using ahead-of-time (AOT) caching. This reduces startup time, improves throughput, and optimizes microservices and containerized deployments while keeping Java’s runtime flexibility.

2. Building 12-Factor Spring Boot Applications: Simplicity, Scalability, and Best Practices - Andy Forset from Heroku explains how 12-factor app principles help build portable, scalable, and maintainable cloud applications using Spring Boot.Spring Boot features like externalized configuration, profiles, stateless processes, and production-ready services align naturally with these principles, enabling robust and flexible deployments.

3. Making sense of Crypto Market Data in real time - Bitvavo, Europe’s largest crypto exchange by Euro volume, combines retail-friendly services with rapid growth and regulatory-backed expansion. Its technology stack—Java, Spring, Kafka, and Druid—supports ultra-low-latency, high-volume trading with real-time data streaming across the organization.

💬 Social Media Posts Of The Week (2)

1. Josh Long emphasizes that upgrading to the latest Java brings huge, often overlooked benefits: better performance, memory improvements, security, and new features—making the choice to modernize obvious. Highlights that using AOT Cache in Java 24 with Spring AOT can drastically reduce Spring app startup times.

2. Thiago G. highlights that Java 25 LTS makes Generational Shenandoah production-ready, improving low-latency GC by efficiently collecting short-lived objects and boosting performance and stability.

🛠️ Code & Tools Of The Week (2)

1. Time4J is a powerful Java library for modern date, time, and calendar handling, supporting multiple calendar systems and astronomical calculations. Time4A is its Android-optimized version, offering better performance and compatibility for mobile apps.

2. JavaCV is a Java wrapper for OpenCV, FFmpeg, and other multimedia libraries, enabling computer vision and audio/video processing in Java.
   Latest version 1.5.12 adds LibgdxFrameConverter, fixes FFmpeg recorder issues, and upgrades OpenCV, FFmpeg, OpenBLAS, and Tesseract.

🧑🏻‍💻 Interview Prep

1. Grokking the Java Interview : eBook designed to help developers prepare efficiently for Java interviews. It covers core Java concepts like OOP, lambdas, and streams, dives into collections and generics, explains concurrency with multithreading and thread safety, and explores JVM internals such as garbage collection and memory management.

2. Master Hibernate and JPA with Spring Boot in 100 Steps : teaches Hibernate and JPA with Spring Boot, covering entity mapping, relationships, queries, performance optimization, caching, and Spring Data JPA integration, enabling learners to build efficient, robust applications.

Check out our in-house new quizzes(3) and interview(21) questions.

📚 Books Of The Week

1. Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud - This book focuses on building resilient microservices architectures using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. The content is tailored for developers aiming to design scalable and maintainable systems. Also covers AOT compilation, observability, reactive services, API security, service discovery, and monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

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