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Crafting a Command Line Experience that Developers Love

If you're setting out to build a highly-usable developer tool, it goes without saying that a proper CLI to interface with your API is paramount. As Zeit and Heroku have been setting the tone for these types of developer tools by doing extensive research into best practices when it comes to a command line "experience," we started our quest by digging into their findings.

Since the Stream CLI is currently in public beta, the methods and philosophies we found from our research, as well as those we unearthed ourselves, are fresh in our minds and we wanted to take a few minutes to outline what we found to be best practices among other CLI tools and developers' needs when it comes to building a proper CLI.

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39 New Features (and APIs) in JDK 12

I’ve written several blog posts that list out all the changes for each of the most recent releases of Java (JDK 10, JDK 11). With JDK 12 just having been released, it seemed the obvious thing to produce another blog in this series. However, I’ll be looking at the flip side of this latter, focusing on some of the pitfalls that might cause problems, should you want to migrate an application to use this version.

We are now well into the new six-month release cadence and everything is working smoothly. I represent Azul on the Java SE JSR Expert Group, and we decided to switch this version to the revised JSR process. This is not radically different; it's more of a streamlining of the process to fit into the available time more easily.

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Using Minimum Fractional Digits With JDK 12 Compact Number Formatting

The post "Compact Number Formatting Comes to JDK 12" demonstrated the support added to NumberFormatin JDK 12 to support compact number formatting. The examples shown in that post only used the instances of NumberFormat returned by invocations of NumberFormat's new overloaded getCompactNumberInstance(-)methods, and so, therefore, they did not specify characteristics such as minimum fractional digits and maximum fractional digits. The results, in some cases, are less than desirable. Fortunately, NumberFormat does allow for minimum and maximum fractional digits to be specified, and this post demonstrates how that can improve the output of the compact number formatting available with JDK 12.

The code listing introduced in the original "Compact Number Formatting Comes to JDK 12" post (which is available on GitHub) has been updated to demonstrate the use of NumberFormat.setMinimumFractionDigits(int). An excerpt of that code is shown next and is followed by the accompanying output.

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Introducing OneDev – new open source git server

About six years ago, we switched to git and developed this tool to serve our own needs as GitHub/GitLab does not have some pull request features we wanted at that time, such as squash support, rebase tracking, review of incremental changes, etc. During our daily usage, more practices are rolled into the product such as language-aware symbol search, source/diff annotation, and more. Now we feel that it is mature and hope that more can benefit from our practices. 

The tool is MIT-licensed and is available at here.

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Grails With Spring Security

Spring Security touts a number of authentication, authorization, instance-based, and various other features that make it so attractive to secure applications with.

With this in mind, due to Grails use of Spring’s Inversion of Control Framework and MVC setup, developers sought to use Spring Security to secure Grails.