At the very beginning of 2014 I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung.

2014 has been quite the year, covering each week with a review. I've been doing a lot more reading to make sure I cover and curate stuff that has value and is actually worth reading.

Let me know in the comments if you're finding my reviews interesting and useful.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

Having the core properties my application uses logged on startup is important – it makes it easy to see the exact layout of the environment and spot potential problems quickly.

The simple but powerful mechanism presented in this article makes that straightforward to set up and can easily be extended to whatever family of properties you might use in your application.

Last week this series explored basic mappings – now it takes a deeper dive into more advanced usecases such as mapping a query result to multiple entities.

A good starting point for both Kafka as well as Spring Integration and Spring XD.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

Complexity in code – definitely worth a read.

I like reading pieces by people that are actually developing software for a living – there's something pragmatic and real about this kind of writing. Yes – you can and should make things better, but don't expect textbook-simple code in your project.

An solid article illustrating the ways you can lay out a microservices architecture. Pushing past the hype – this is actually useful.

A word of warning not to enable caching without first understanding what potential data consistency issues you are introducing into your app. There are certainly ways – good ways – to deal with these issues, but it's important to have a good grasp of what these are first.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

A very useful read if you're thinking of starting up a blog, putting your work out there and iterating in public.

What I would add is that – if you are thinking of starting – do that today, not tomorrow – tomorrow is never.

4. Comics

And my favorite comics of the week:

5. Pick of the Week

Earlier this year I introduced the “Pick of the Week” section here in my “Weekly Review”. If you’re already on my email list – you got the pick already – hope you enjoyed it.