Engineering With Java: Digest #90
Practical Java patterns for writing cleaner, faster, production-ready code
👋 Java Devs! Welcome to this week’s addition! I hope you’re all doing great.
This week, we cover essential insights on:
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Can Java Microservices Be As Fast As Go? A 2026 Benchmark Update : A fresh benchmark from the Helidon team compares modern Java microservices against Go, showing that recent JVM improvements, virtual threads, and framework optimizations have significantly narrowed the performance gap. The results suggest that Java can deliver Go-like throughput and latency for many microservice workloads while retaining its mature ecosystem, tooling, and developer productivity advantages.
5 Advanced Java Tips That Senior Engineers Actually Use : The article highlights practical Java techniques used in real-world systems to write cleaner and more efficient code. It focuses on better use of collections, streams, concurrency, and performance-aware design. Overall, it encourages moving beyond basic Java usage toward more scalable and maintainable engineering practices.
Building an AI-Powered Operations Assistant with Spring AI and MongoDB Atlas : The article explains how to add conversational memory to a Spring AI assistant using MongoDB Atlas, enabling it to maintain context across multiple interactions. It combines short-term session memory with long-term storage to improve continuity and personalization. This turns a basic chat system into a more persistent, context-aware operations assistant.
Building Java Containers Without a Dockerfile: Azul Zulu and Paketo Buildpacks : Shows how Paketo Buildpacks can package Java apps into container images without writing a Dockerfile, using Azul Zulu for the JVM. It automatically handles layering, JVM tuning, and image optimization. The result is simpler builds and smaller, production-ready containers.
Native SQL in Java Without JDBC Boilerplate — Meet Ujorm3 : Ujorm3 is a lightweight Java library that lets us write and execute native SQL with minimal JDBC boilerplate while still mapping results cleanly to Java objects. It focuses on simplicity and direct SQL control instead of heavy ORM abstractions. The goal is faster, more transparent database access without losing type mapping convenience.
A Spring Boot App With Half the Startup Time : The article explains that slow startup is mainly caused by heavy classpath scanning, bean creation, auto-configuration, and external dependencies in large Spring Boot apps. It suggests improving startup using techniques like lazy initialization, reducing unnecessary dependencies, and tuning Spring configuration. Advanced options like AOT compilation, CDS, and GraalVM native images can significantly reduce startup time for production and cloud workloads.
Spring Boot Webhook Request Deduplication : The article explains how to handle duplicate webhook events in Spring Boot by implementing idempotency checks. It typically uses a unique event ID stored in a cache or database (like Redis) to detect and ignore повтор requests. This ensures reliable processing even when providers retry webhooks.
Introduction to Cross-Platform Java Development With Codename One : Codename One allows Java developers to build mobile apps that run on Android and iOS from a single codebase by compiling Java into native binaries. It provides its own UI toolkit and cloud build system to handle platform differences. The tradeoff is easier cross-platform development but less direct access to native JVM features.
How Agentic Coding Can Help You Migrate Java Applications Faster : AI coding agents are transforming Java maintenance by automating upgrades, refactoring, and modernization tasks that traditionally required significant engineering effort. Tools like Oracle Code Assist and Cline combine codebase understanding, migration knowledge, and context-aware workflows to help teams adopt newer Java versions faster while reducing technical debt and operational overhead.
Do You Really Need Hibernate? : The speaker argues that for many data-heavy business applications, we may not need Hibernate/JPA and can use jOOQ instead. jOOQ follows a database-first approach, generates type-safe Java classes from the schema, and lets developers work directly with SQL, avoiding ORM complexity such as entity state management and common Hibernate pitfalls. The talk also highlights how AI-assisted development makes writing SQL easier, further reducing the need for heavy ORM abstractions.
Scalable AI Agents with Koog + Spring AI + Spring Boot : The session presents how the Koog framework integrates with Spring AI and Spring Boot to build production-grade AI agents. The focus is on reliability, control, memory, persistence, and structured workflows rather than autonomous "black-box" agents. Using a banking application example, the speaker shows how custom agent orchestration, typed subtasks, and guardrails make AI systems safer and more scalable for enterprise use.
The Joy of Queries : Spring Data is introducing typed property paths, a new way to build queries using Java method references instead of fragile string-based property names. This provides compile-time safety, IDE refactoring support, and better developer experience without requiring annotation processors, generated metamodels, or QueryDSL. The goal is to make queries more expressive, maintainable, and resilient as applications evolve.
Java Interview Question - Find Minimum Version in Rotated Release History
Spring Boot Interview Question — Your API Went Viral Overnight
Thats all for this week friends! Thanks for reading this far. If you liked it please share with your network.
Happy Coding 🚀
Suraj
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