Software. Development.

solr

Using spring-data-solr with configurable Solr core

Developing Java applications accessing data from Solr is easier with spring-data-solr. You can just use Repository interfaces, auto generated findBy... methods or @Query annotations to define your data sources. Unfortunately using this method it is not possible to configure the name of the Solr core (or collection). The name of

HTTPS

Securing web services with Let's Encrypt (Docker and Bitnami)

As I spent some time trying to get this to work, so I write my steps down, as personal knowledge base. Docker One of the most useful docker containers out there is jwilder's nginx-proxy. There is a companion docker container for let's encrypt which works fine... if you know how

Ghost

Using Disqus with your managed Ghost blog

The documentation about integrating Disqus Discussions in Ghost only applies to self hosted Ghost instances or at least self packaged themes. So I created a snippet which you can paste in your Blog footer via Ghost's Code Injection.

Software Development

Best Practices setting up software projects - Part 1: The build tool

Within the last years developing, prototyping and designing software projects I collected a set of best practices for setting up and developing software projects. I wrote down a more general overview in my article about about defining key factors for successful software development. The following (opinionated) principles are not limited

web

Basic Auth with Geb and FirefoxDriver

Update: Unfortunately this solution is not working any more with recent versions of Firefox and FirefoxDriver. I spent some time currently to automate integration tests and webtests, mainly using spock and, for the web test part, geb. Unfortunately I did not find any (simple) working example with basic auth. I

Software Development

Defining key factors for successful software development

A while ago I was asked about my opinion of key factors for successful and quality software development. There are a few lists published from more or less famous programmers, like this excellent collection from Jens Rantil or this from computer game development legend John Romero (scroll down to the

Frontend

Generated Styleguides: A markdown approach

A generated styleguide catalogue has many advantages in every day project live (see below), but as most of the available tools did not suite my needs (difficult to set up, too much tool dependencies, bugs, ...) I created my own solution: [style-code](https://github.com/paulwellnerbou/style-code).

java

A web based Java DateTime parse debugger

After using the Grok Debugger often in the last weeks, I searched for a similar service for joda's time patterns to parse strings. I did not find anything, so I created one, for you and for me. Update on 2017-09-26: Just updated this application to use Java 8's DateTime API,

Jenkins

Git Changelog Jenkins Plugin Released

As announced earlier, the first public version of the Git Changelog Plugin for Jenkins is now released and available via Jenkins' offical update site. I got some inspiration from Oleg Nenashev on Jenkins' mailing list, so I restructured the library and the plugin so that the Jira filter is just

load test

Load testing a new environment replaying live logs using chronicreplay

While creating a proof of concept of a new, cloud based environment of a big news platform, we used chronicreplay to test the behaviour of the new environment under a realistic load, similar to the productive system. chronicreplay replays Apache (or any other) log files in the correct time and

solr

Solr 4 packaged with logging libraries

The Solr 4 web archive (war) does not ship with logging libraries any more. So everyone who want to deploy it into a container have to either include the logging libraries in the classpath of the container or repackage the solr with the logging libraries. I assume there are hundreds

Jenkins

git-jira-log 1.0 released

A while ago I finished version 1.0 of my library to extract a changelog in form of a Jira filter based on ticket names in the git log of the project. This library can be used as command line utility as well as library. The git part is based

git

Changelog with GIT and JIRA: Creating JIRA filter URL based on git commits between two revisions with bash

I am working on a library and a jenkins plugin doing this right, but until then, here is a shell script which creates the URL to a JIRA filter containing the tickets mentioned in all commit messages between the two given revisions. Besides git and the standard command line tools

java

Getting commits between annotated tags with JGit

JGit does not support getting commits between annotated tags (or any revision and an annotated tag) as you might expect. Following code will work perfectly with commit hashs and branch identifiers: public Iterable<RevCommit> getJGitLogBetween(final String rev1, final String rev2) throws IOException, GitAPIException { Ref refFrom = repo.getRef(

Frontend

Aligning form elements in one line using bootstrap's grid

Bootstrap's standard CSS for forms and inputs does support more than one input elements and labels in one line using bootstrap's CSS class form-inline. You can use Bootstrap's grid system to align your input elements and labels, if you want a more complex, but still consistent form layout by adding

IDE

Brackets on HiDPI screens on Linux

Chrome beta for Linux is supporting HiDPI scaling now, but Brackets, which is based on Chromium, does not yet. If you don't want to wait, you can use Brandon Bertelsen's extension ui-too-small, available in Bracket's extension registry. This extension does not affect the editor font, as this can be changed

Frontend

Avoid multiple imports of the same SCSS file with SASS (a different approach)

Imagine following, quite common scenario: We have a scss file defining standard font and text styles (font.scss), another scss file which defines link styles (links.scss) which uses variables and definitions of font.scss and a third scss file which defines styles for form elements (form.scss), which depends

docker

A Dockerfile for git-deps

In Git Minutes #32, Adam Spiers talked about git-deps, which was interesting for me. We don't cherry pick usually nor backport commits, but I analyse bugs trying to find out when and with which the buggy code was introduced. So I gave it a try. Just before Ubuntu released 15.

Webserver

Ways to start a Webserver in your current Directory

Lately I searched for a way to open a web server, mainly for static content, from the current directory under Linux. In the java world, I am used to do this with maven or gradle, starting an embedded jetty, tomcat or similar. I did not want to do this for