Setup Java 9 in Eclipse Oxygen

This post gives the quick steps to setup Eclipse Oxygen with Java 9. This relies on Java™ 9 support for Eclipse JDT is available now. At this time, the it is not fully functional, and I have faced a couple of issues setting this up. Full support for Java 9 is expected on October 11, 2017 with Oxygen 1a release. Follow these steps to install the support for Java 9.

Using Comparators with Java 8 Streams

This post gives a few examples of how to use Comparator with Java 8 streams to Sort and to find the Maximum and Minimum elements in a stream.

Comparing Simple types with Comparator.comparing* methods

The Comparator.comparingDouble, Comparator.comparingInt and Comparator.comparingLong etc. methods can be used to do sorting or finding max and min from stream. The following example uses the comparingDouble method to compare and sort a stream of doubles generated using the Stream.generate() method. The Stream.generate has been explained my earlier post "Java 8 Streams"

  // Sort a stream of Doubles
  Stream.generate(Math::random).limit(10).sorted(Comparator.comparingDouble(Double::valueOf)).forEach(System.out::println);

Auto-Restart Spring Boot Application On Code Change With Dev Tools

Spring Boot Dev Tools enables auto-restarting a Spring boot application whenever any class is changed in the class path. This is not comparable in speed with the hot swap functionality offered by Jrebel or Spring Loaded, but this is a very simple and easy way to implement and better than manual restart. In this post, I use a simple Spring boot rest echo service to demonstrate how spring boot dev tools can be used to auto restart the application when using Maven on an IDE or Gradle from command line. In either options, the main trigger for a restart is the change to a class file, which means that the change to a Java file has to be compiled either by the IDE in option 1 or by Gradle in option 2.

Passing System Properties and Arguments With Gradle

When using the Gradle application plugin, Gradle spawns a new JVM on the fly, and does not pass the System Properties or Command-line arguments to the new Java process. This post explains how to pass the System properties and command-line arguments when using Gradle application plugin.

Load Environment Specific Properties Files Using Spring

One of the more common aspects of enterprise application development involves environment specific properties files. Some examples include Database configurations or external JMS resources etc. The common way to address this problem is to use multiple properties file an build the Application EAR/WAR/JAR at compile time. Although this works, this solution also means that we maintain different build scripts for different environments, or having some file renames etc. while building the application. Spring profiles address this problem in a more efficient way. Like any other property, using Spring profiles, we can inject the environment profile into Spring and Spring will handle the loading of the appropriate configuration files. In this post, I show how to load environment specific properties files using Spring.

Merge and Paginate PDF files using iText 5

In this post we will see a way to merge multiple PDF files while adding page numbers at the bottom of each page in the format Page 1 of 10. The following steps give a brief description of the steps used to merge and add page number to the merged PDF.

Merge PDF files using iText 5

This is an example code for a simple PDF merge using iText 5. We use three InputStreams in a List as input and merged file is written to the file system.