Category: java

To enable logging for cassandra queries with Spring Data and the datastax driver you first need to register a QueryLogger instance with your cluster:

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QueryLogger queryLogger = QueryLogger.builder().build();
cluster.register(queryLogger);

You also need to specify the log levels for the QueryLogger in your properties:

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logging.level.com.datastax.driver.core.QueryLogger.NORMAL=DEBUG
logging.level.com.datastax.driver.core.QueryLogger.SLOW=DEBUG
logging.level.com.datastax.driver.core.QueryLogger.ERROR=DEBUG

While you might not always to turn logging on for NORMAL or even SLOW it can ease debugging a lot.

If you are able to use Java 8 or up you can make use of the various methods of Random that return an IntStream.

E.g. if you want to generate random distinct numbers from a range [0, 100) you can use:

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OfInt iterator = ThreadLocalRandom.current().ints(0, 100).distinct().iterator();
 
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
  System.out.println("Next random number: " + iterator.next());
}

Since our range contains 100 Integers and .distinct() was used we can’t draw more than 100 numbers from the stream!

When you want to convert a String to int or Integer you can use two simple methods from the Integer class.

To convert a String to primitive int use Integer.parseInt(String s)

String a = "1234";
int x = Integer.parseInt(a);

To convert a String to an instance of Integer use Integer.valueOf(String s)

String a = "1234";
Integer x = Integer.valueOf(a);

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A common mistake Java novices do is using the == operator to compare Strings. This does almost certainly lead to unexpected and unwanted behaviour. There is a simple solution to this problem and a not so simple explanation why it is such a common mistake.

The simple solution is to use String.equals instead of the == operator.

So when you want to know if two String objects hold the same value instead of

String a = "Test";
String b = "Test";
if (a == b) {
  // Do something
}

just use this:

String a = "Test";
String b = "Test";
if (a.equals(b)) {
  // Do something
}

But look out for null Strings, == handles null Strings nicely but when you call

String a = null;
String b = "Test";
if (a.equals(b)) {
  // Do something
}

it will result in a NullPointerException!

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It recently happened to me that I was stuck at work on a Windows installation without access to admin privileges. While I could use a bunch of portable apps I could not find a portable JDK. To get a portable JDK without admin privileges in Windows you have to follow three simple steps.

1. Download

Download the JDK from Oracle (e.g. JDK 8 8u111).

2. Extract

If you want to use the x86 version simply open the .exe file with 7-Zip. It contains a single file tools.zip, which contains all the files we need.

For x64 the tools.zip can be found in .rsrc\1033\JAVA_CAB10\111\

Extract the tools.zip to the desired JDK directory (e.g. “D:\JavaJDK\”).
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Often while programming you find yourself glueing pre-existing code fragments together. This works out sometimes but even more often it is rather annoying. These days i had to encrypt a pdf and do some other stuff with it in java and therefore put together some libraries i found. One of these libraries offered a method to encrypt the pdf and write the result into a ByteArrayOutputStream. Later then i had to push the encrypted pdf into another method that needed it as a ByteArrayInputStream. First i simply copied the content of the ByteArrayOutputStream as byte array into the ByteArrayInputStream, but this didn’t satisfy me since i knew that the ByteArrayInputStream just needed to be initialized with the internal buffer of the ByteArrayOutputStream. Since this internal buffer is hidden from outside i made up the ByteArrayInOutStream which is a ByteArrayOutputStream that has an additional method that returns a ByteArrayInputStream which is initialized with the internal buffer of the ByteArrayOutputStream. This allows for a instant ‘conversion’ that does not use up more memory than required.

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I recently needed to start a method asynchronously on the server start up.

I came up with this code (pseudocode):

@Singleton
@Startup
public StartupEJB {
   @PostConstruct
   private void postConstruct() {
      worker();
   }
 
   @Asynchronous
   public void worker() {
      // Do something heavy
   }
}

This approach failed, the worker() method was not executed asynchronously.

I then found out that the Application Server (in my case JBoss) calls the method directly when it is located inside the same EJB: source.

The solution was to use a seperate EJB that launched the worker Thread:

@Stateless
public class ExecutorBean {
 
   @Asynchronous
   public void execute(Runnable command) {
      command.run();
   }
}

and

@Singleton
@Startup
public StartupEJB {
   @EJB
   ExecutorBean executorBean;
 
   @PostConstruct
   private void postConstruct() {
      worker();
   }
 
   public void worker() {
      executorBean.execute(new Runnable() {
         @Override
         public void run() {
            // Do something heavy
         }        
      });      
   }
}