Don’t miss this unique chance to share your knowledge, experience and passion with the global Java community at the most anticipated Java event of the year!

The Java2Days 2023 conference, taking place June 27-29 in the beautiful resort of Albena, Bulgaria is inviting speakers from around the world to share their proposals for talks, workshops and panel discussions. Java2Days 2023 is looking for inspiring and innovative content that covers a wide range of topics related to Java and its ecosystem, including.

Here are the topics it will cover:
🔸 Core Java features and enhancements
🔸 JVM languages and frameworks
🔸 Microservices and cloud-native development
🔸 Performance optimization and monitoring
🔸 Modern web development with Java
🔸 Security and privacy in Java applications
🔸 DevOps and continuous integration/delivery
🔸 Emerging trends and future directions in Java

If you have an idea that you believe will captivate and enlighten the Java community, submit your proposal. Java2Days welcome submissions from speakers with diverse backgrounds and expertise levels, from seasoned professionals to first-time presenters.

By presenting at Java2Days 2023, you will have the opportunity to:
🔹 Share your knowledge and experience with a passionate and engaged audience
🔹 Network with fellow Java professionals, enthusiasts, and industry leaders
🔹 Gain recognition as an expert in your field
🔹 Contribute to the growth and development of the Java community

To submit your proposal, please visit here and complete the submission form. The deadline for submissions is May 31st, 2023. Selected speakers will be notified by June 5th, 2023 or earlier.

Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to showcase your expertise and make a lasting impact on the Java community. Submit your proposal today and join the big and exciting world of Java2Days 2023!

The problem of mismatched configurations in application development

In modern software development, workloads are typically viewed as microservices, with each component packaged in its own container. Implementing containerised workloads allows teams to run their code in different environments. Desires meet reality when containers need to be managed at scale, and teams begin to use orchestration platforms that include a broad set of tuples that support application development.

As a developer, you might use Docker Compose for on-premises development and deploy to remote environments that are based on systems like Kubernetes, Google Cloud Run, Amazon ECS, or HashiCorp Nomad. To successfully develop, test, deploy, and run a workload, you not only need to know the platform and related tools your team is using, but you also need to synchronize the specification of each workload. If units are configured differently across platforms, teams risk configuration inconsistencies.

The question of how things are now reflected appropriately in the next environment-which may run on Kubernetes and be managed via helm maps-gets a different answer in each team and depends on the complexity of the task at hand. A variable change is easier to synchronize than declaring a database dependency across platforms.

Result specification
The Score specification allows you to specify which containers to use, whether there are resource or service dependencies, whether ports should be opened or what data volumes should be referenced – whatever the workload requires of you, it is written to score.yaml. Structurally, the specification consists of 3 top-level elements:

• Containers: defines how the workload tasks are executed.
• Resources: defines the dependencies required on the workload.
• service: defines how the workload can reveal its resources when executed.

Since all platform configuration files are generated from the same Specification, the risk of configuration inconsistencies between environments is greatly reduced. A change to score.yaml will be automatically reflected in all environments without the need for the developer to manually intervene.

According to Backstage Director and General Manager, Austin Lamon, the new suite of five plugins for the developer platform focuses on developer efficiency. The bundle includes Pulse, a productivity and satisfaction survey tool, role-based access control, a no-code access management plugin, and Insights for monitoring Backstage usage across the enterprise.

But those aren’t the only extensions. Skill Exchange also connects talent within the organization, and Soundcheck codifies engineering best practices. Backstage’s main advantage is that it is flexible, extensible and open source, allowing companies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Development teams can use Backstage to build self-service portals to manage assets and unify applications, documents, services and tools into a single UI. It includes a catalog for managing software, including microservices and libraries, templates to spin up new projects, and a catalog of open source plugins.

“Gone are the days when IDEs competed on core features like code creation speed, usability, build automation and more. Тhe competition has moved to adjacent areas — ultimately to foster higher developer velocity. Spotify Backstage shows this with its latest innovations.”

 

Said Holger Mueller, vice president and analyst at Constellation Research.

He also adds that premium plugins Skill Exchange and Soundcheck are key to developer success. The former reflects the ability to work on gigs, while the latter aims to create a productive environment for developers.

Baskѕtаgе is a platform designed to enable companies to build customized “developer portals” that bring together all of their tools, plugins, dаnаgеs, services, APIs and dаnаgеs into a single interface. Through Vaskѕtаgе, users can monitor, for example, Kуberpetеѕ, pоvеpоvе the status of a Сl/CD, view the costs of an оblаgе or follow up on security incidents.

According to Gartner, democratisation, hyper-automation and composable systems, as well as business initiatives, will be the key factors that will accelerate the adoption of low-code technologies.

“Organizations are increasingly turning to low-code development technologies to fulfill growing demands for speed application delivery and highly customized automation workflows”,

said Varsha Mehta, Senior Market Research Specialist at Gartner.

“Equipping both professional IT developers and non-IT personas — business technologists — with diverse low-code tools enables organizations to reach the level of digital competency and speed of delivery required for the modern agile environment”,

he continued.

Such a conceptualization of business strategy requires organizations to break down services and processes into microservices or bundled business capabilities and compose new offerings by bringing together these building blocks.

Low-code development technologies enable business users and developers with little or no coding experience to develop applications based on business needs.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, developers outside formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the user base for low-code development tools, up from 60% in 2021.

The company has developed a standard framework for Java-based services that provides Holistic Overload Detection and Overload Remediation, aka “Hodor.” It is designed to detect service overload caused by multiple root causes, and to automatically remediate the problem by dropping just enough traffic to allow the service to recover, and then maintaining an optimal traffic level to prevent reentering overload, according to a LinkedIn’s blog post.

The service is designed for a wide range of different types of overload. The most obvious ones revolve around physical resource limits such as CPU and memory exhaustion, and I/O limits for network and disk access. There are also virtual resource limits such as execution threads, pooled DB connections, or semaphore permits.

These limits may be exceeded due to increases in traffic to the service, though they can also be reached when latencies of downstream traffic increase, which can cause the number of concurrent requests being handled in the local service to increase with no change to the incoming request rate as noted in the article.

Hodor’s services include framework overview; detecting CPU overload; shedding requests when overloaded; testing and rollout and more.

The CEO of Weaveworks, Alexis Richardson,  commented:

“Enterprise customers have made it clear that trusted application delivery is critical to the success of their increasingly complex cloud-native platforms. With the acquisition of Magalix, Weaveworks introduces customizable policies, compliance capabilities, and comprehensive risk visibility into GitOps workflows, ensuring only authorized applications are deployed and there are no nefarious activities.”

The integration of Magalix’s policy engine will help DevOps teams to apply consistent policies and practices across multiple Kubernetes environments. This will empower Weaveworks customers to bridge the gap between developers, DevOps, and security teams.

According to Weaveworks, Magalix simplifies DevSecOps and enables cloud-native environments to be more secure by integrating directly into the source, build, and deployment stages of the software lifecycle.

The approach will be the same as Kubernetes so that users can scale their applications while maintaining regulatory requirements using Magalix’s security capabilities. Mohamed Ahmed, the founder, and CEO of Magalix said:

“We are seeing an increase in customers who run a zero-trust security model turning to GitOps to bring DevOps to cloud-native application development and IT operations.”

Ahmed also noted that they believe that integrating security into GitOps pipelines brings considerable agility and speed, preventing errors and protecting against attacks that could shut down the entire platform. He ensured that Weaveworks and Magalix share the same mission to ease innovation without jeopardizing security and stability.

MicroProfile 5.0 enables MicroProfile APIs to be used together with Jakarta EE 9.1 (Jakarta EE namespace). This release was mainly focused on updating dependencies from javax to jakarta, as well as overall stability and usability improvements.

Some of the additional benefits of MicroProfile 5.0 are: 

• Richer specification integration
• No vendor lock-in. Interoperability across different MicroProfile implementations provides users the freedom to select one or combine many MicroProfile implementations in a microservices architecture.
• Annotation-based and programmatic APIs
• MicroProfile Starter for MicroProfile project generation
  • VSCode Extension Pack for MicroProfile
  • Intellij plugin for MicroProfile
• A command-line interface (CLI) to generate gradle or maven projects.

The release lays the foundation for the rapid innovation of MicroProfile APIs for its 2022 releases.

More information about it you can find here.

Cortex says it experienced 10x customer growth since its launch in May 2021. Current customers include the likes of Grammarly, 8×8 and Rappi.

The  mission of the company is to build a system of record for engineering teams — or at least those that adopt modern development practices. The services catalog is at the heart of what Cortex does and it was also the first product the team launched. Now it is starting to build out its features around this catalog. Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta said:

“We very quickly realized that once you have all these microservices being tracked in this catalog, you can do some interesting things there.”

The goal is to give engineering leaders insights into the quality of their services, but also to help the engineers themselves understand what services are available and what their status is.

With today’s announcement, the company is also launching its Service Creation tool. It gives developers a basic scaffold for new services based on their own templates.

Also new with today’s release are new team features to help improve cross-team collaboration and developer onboarding.

The changes also include cultural and practical transformations such as adopting continuous planning in agile, instrumenting shift-left testing, proactively addressing security risks, and instituting site reliability engineering.

Here are several experts to go a level deeper and suggest best practices on how the development process changes when building and deploying cloud-native applications and microservices.

High velocity requires coordination and operations awareness

Jason Walker, field CTO for BigPanda spoke about his experiences with development teams that successfully build, deploy, and enhance microservices. He acknowledges:

“The most significant impact is velocity, and the dev-test-deploy cycle time is drastically reduced. Developing in the cloud for a cloud-based service and leveraging an ecosystem of microservices for inputs, an agile team can move very quickly.”

Walker suggests that the working environment must help teams stay on track and deliver business value while operating at high velocities. He offers several best practices:

• Leaders at all levels must understand and align the strategic goals to prevent teams from drifting away from business objectives.
• Scrum masters should embrace agile metrics, score stories accurately, and track team velocity over time, noting and accommodating variability for long-term planning.
• Knowledge management processes and delivering accurate, up-to-date documentation have to be baked into the software development life cycle to prevent modular teams from sprawling away from each other and developing incompatibilities.
• An actionable monitoring strategy is necessary. Synthetic and client telemetry can be useful macro-indicators of overall service performance, and the signal-to-noise ratio in monitoring has to be measured.

Code refactoring enhances microservices 

One of the more important coding disciplines in object-oriented programming and SOA is code refactoring. The techniques allow developers to restructure code as they better understand usage considerations, performance factors, or technical debt issues. Refactoring is a key technique for transforming monolithic applications into microservices. Refactoring strategies include separating the presentation layer, extracting business services, and refactoring databases.

Robin Yeman, a strategic advisory board member at Project and Team, has spent most of her career working on large-scale government and defence systems. Robin concedes:

“The largest technology barriers to utilizing agile in building or updating complex legacy systems are the many dependencies in the software architecture, forcing multiple handoffs between teams and delays in delivery. Refactoring the software architecture of large legacy systems to utilize cloud-native applications and microservices reduces dependencies between the systems and the teams supporting them.”

Refactoring also improves microservices in important ways, such as:

• Updating the domain models when the business model evolves
• Paring down services to conform to the single-responsibility principle
• Improving messaging in event-driven architectures
• Enhancing observability and error validation
• Addressing changes to DevOps pipelines or container configuration

Kit Merker, COO at Nobl9, offers this advice to organizations transitioning to cloud-native applications and microservices.

“You can’t just rewrite everything—you need to phase the transition. One best practice is to set clear service-level objectives that are implementation agnostic and manage the user’s impression of your service even as you are transitioning to cloud-native implementations.”

Embrace microservice design patterns

Design patterns have always been used as tools to structure code around common problem sets. For example, categories of object-oriented design patterns are creational, behavioural, and structural; they’re used to solve common problems in software design. SOA design patterns have been around for more than a decade and are a precursor to today’s REST API and cloud API design patterns.

Using microservice design patterns is critical for long-term success. Technology organizations target independent, resilient, auto-provisioning services that support failure isolation, continuous delivery, and a decentralized governance model. That can be challenging if development teams don’t have a common language, microservice architecture, and implementation strategy to develop with design patterns. Tyler Johnson, co-founder and CTO of PrivOps, explains that developing microservices is a key strategy for reducing complexity. He also adds:

“One way to describe cloud-native applications is as a set of distributed, interacting, complex systems. This complexity can quickly become unmanageable, which is why a modular, standardized microservices architecture including standardized develops tooling, APIs, and data models are necessary.“

Michael Bachman, global architect and principal technologist at Boomi, suggests that using the composite microservice design pattern enables developers to focus on the user experience. This design pattern is particularly important when developers build applications connected to multi-cloud services and SaaS platform APIs. Bachman explains:

“The composite is a collection of endpoints presented through an abstracted view. Developers can go to a service catalogue, make calls to a composite, and don’t care about what goes on underneath. We’re getting closer to the end-user and enabling a trusted experience through a composite service at the high end of the stack.”

Overall, building cloud-native applications and microservices requires development teams to excel at longstanding software development practices such as collaboration, code refactoring, and developing reusable and reliable services. Since teams are developing these services at a significant scale, it’s important to learn, adapt, and mature these best practices.

webMethods customers will now be able to make quicker business decisions by analyzing the data flowing through their integrations in near real-time as well as automating and programmatically building out an API management strategy. This helps them to connect with their enterprises as they seek to modernize their business and create great customer experiences.

Dr Stefan Sigg, CPO at Software AG, commented:

“Companies are becoming more connected today, through both choice and necessity. The complexity that comes along with this is a real challenge. Through webMethods, we’re helping companies to overcome those challenges so that they can focus on innovation and great customer experiences.”

The latest updates to webMethods include the following new capabilities:

• webMethods DataHub: With the new webMethods DataHub, users can now access near real-time data insights using analytics, to make live business decisions. Users not only reduce their time to access data, but they can also do so through their choice of leading industry BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and others. This new offering will eliminate batch downloading and serve up data faster without involving complex IT approvals and coding.
• webMethods.io MFT: As part of the multi-function iPaaS, Software AG is now adding MFT capabilities to current integration, B2B, API and IoT capabilities to webMethods.io. With the addition of cloud MFT for internal and B2B file transfers, Software AG continues to enhance its industry-leading iPaaS.
• webMethods Developer Portal: A new lightweight, an embeddable portal that is fully API-enabled makes it easy to create an API marketplace for developers that is branded with a company’s look and feel. Full headless capabilities enable simplified automation. Insightful dashboards and intuitive customizations enable businesses to create a collaborative space for developers.
• Connector Development Ecosystem: With the new Connector Development Program, ISVs, OEM partners, resellers and customers can partner with Software AG to build, test, certify and publish connectors to webMethods.io. This makes more connectors and integrations available on-demand for webMethods.io users, speeding up the integration process without extra burden on internal teams. The Connector Development ecosystem enhances already available, hundreds of Software AG connectors and recipes.

Suraj Kumar, GM of API, Integration and Microservices at Software AG, commented:

“Today, companies are looking for ways to connect all their technology, whether it’s legacy or cutting edge. Our customers continue to face the pressure of performing at the ‘speed of business while trying to democratize their IT investments.”

Kumar also added that from global banks to retailers, they are responding to companies that need real-time business insights, automate their integrations and deliver hybrid cloud solutions without abandoning existing systems.

To hear more about the latest from Software AG, attend the conXion event, October 5-7 or on-demand afterwards.