Author - Irina Kolesnikova

IoC container isolation

Sometimes developers discuss which framework or library is better. It depends on the performance, usability, flexibility or just a taste. Likely, my opinion won’t be new, however, I think that with the help of modern technologies it is always possible to write clean and beautiful code.

It doesn’t depend on the library or framework, there aren’t any perfect solutions, everything has advantages and disadvantages, however any widely used technologies allow to achieve a good result.

The most difficult thing in the code design is the maintenance of dependencies. You should consider dependencies of classes, third party components, libraries, etc.
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Benchmarking: Best Practice For Code Optimization

For most developers performance testing sounds like something really difficult to get started on. It might come to mind that some special and usually expensive environment and tools to test the performance.

Well, sometimes you do indeed need them to test the network communications impact, or if you have a cluster and want to measure its capacity, for example. But if you have some small system or you don’t have a lot of money, you may still face performance problems. Sometimes you can’t scale the environment, because it is expensive or your code has bugs preventing it from scaling.
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Flexible Data Model Design

Introduction

Data often changes. When it comes to integration, the data can change unpredictably. Of course, large vendors notify the community about the breaking changes in advance or give us some period for migration. However, if you implement your own component of a (distributed) system then you likely face a situation when, for example, Tom changed something, while you were working on your cool feature of a Java-application and now you have to fix some unexpected failures on your side. Or a customer asked you to include some small (or big) changes in the initial specifications and next day Tom found out that his part did not seem to be working.

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Automated Tests: Why and How

If you aren’t implementing a prototype for some quick demo in some 8 hours, 3 days, etc. to archive it in a folder like the “trash” right after that, then you will have to think about the quality assurance, finding bugs, etc. Somebody will have to do this job after all. Whether you include the automated tests in the code development process or you totally rely on the testers, the automated tests will appear in your system sooner or later (or the project will die aborning).

The worst thing is that auto tests are also the code, i.e. all problems relating to the code development (the design, bugs, usability, performance, etc.) exist in tests. When you automate the testing, you actually implement the new functionality in your system. Thus, you should develop tests as any other features.

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Search functionality design practices. Part 2

Implementation of the search functionality is a challenge for a software developer. Search-related requirements influence significantly on the final architecture of the system. In the first part we studied different filters and some practices of their implementation. In this part I will tell about the full text search.

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Search functionality design practices. Part 1

The humanity had started searching long before the beginning of modern computer century. Thanks to the common sense people invented indices. Libraries, dictionaries, maps made the life easier for the next generations of knowledge hunters. And now you as a software developer face the necessity to implement your own search functionality. Usually you can meet search-related requirements at the end of the customer’s list. But, in my opinion, they influence significantly on the final architecture of the system. Furthermore, the search index is the foundation of searching, its design errors can lead to the wrong choice of storage or database that can break your system in general.

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Microservices: dreams and reality

The Microservices Architecture becomes more and more popular. The successful experience of our large-scale and well-known projects inspires us to try this approach in our enterprise applications. Deciding to implement the project in this style, we forget that systems like Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, etc have a long history, these projects are not initially implemented in the architecture, but gradually came to it.
When you don’t have the whole scope of the requirements or use cases for your system it is hardly possible to avoid errors in the design.Read More