In addition to Stream.toList(), what other modern methods can simplify Java code? — Now that Java 20 has been released, what is the most convenient feature of the Java language? At least for the developers dealing with data, it is still the lambda expressions and the stream API introduced in Java 8. The stream API allows to tangibly simplify code by eliminating for-loops…

Java server applications using virtual threads are clearly more performant than Node.js — Virtual threads introduced in Java 19 are intended to speed up concurrent network requests. In this post, I want to compare the throughput of regular and virtual threads making HTTP requests. For that, I use two virtual machines in the Google Cloud. Each machine has 8 CPUs and 16 GB…

Needless entity classes do not help but pollute and complicate Java code. Consider saving your time. — In programming there are always several ways to achieve the same result. Of them some options need more time to be accomplished. What is the point of entity classes in Java web applications? Entities normally serve as DTO classes. DTOs helps the backend to deserialize and handle data, such as…

Java API offers many convenient methods for functional transformations of strings. The powerful text-related API has not changed since Java 12. — The stream API is probably the most convenient or at least elegant feature of Java. The chained stream-based code tends to be shorter and more legible than the equivalent code with for-loops. Unfortunately that is true only if the code inside the lambdas cannot throw a checked exception, the most…

Loading data with one SQL query and disrupting the circular references to enable serialization as a JSON. It sounds simple but is tricky. — The browser is the typical and easiest means for interactive presentation of data. When a research team needs to analyze in some even smarter way historical data stored in a data warehouse, a project-specific web application visualizing results of SQL queries can be quickly developed.

Entities are boring, without them you can sometimes save time — A browser is a convenient tool for data visualization. In a browser, data can be presented in interactive charts or tables with relatively little effort. One can choose any imaginable chart from many ready-to-use options (for example look at https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery or https://plotly.com/javascript/). So in companies, it is common to use…

The magic magnetic cube is a colored variant of the Soma cube puzzle. Let’s solve the puzzle in a browser using JavaScript. — I recently came across an addictive puzzle for kids — Magic magnetic cube. It is a set of 7 blocks with different shapes and colours that have to be assembled into a cube.

Free text entered by users might have typos. How to find approximate, misspelt matches to the searched string? — Advantages and drawbacks of free text Some people at work fill text fields in some forms. Later their colleagues analyse or process the free text in thousands of forms and draw some meaningful conclusions. For example, imagine doctors who fill patients records and also do clinical research using the data collected inside their hospital.

Custom Highlight API is novel easy way to highlight strings in a web page — A Find or Filter field is a indispensable attribute of the web applications visualising text data. When a user searches for a string, it is easy to filter the displayed data but it can be complicated to highlight the matches. Until recently there was only one way — to wrap…