MongoDB database is one of the most popular NoSql solutions on the market today. Of course, it provides support for .NET Core, as well as for other popular programming languages and frameworks. In this article, I want to share my experience when I started to use Mongo as the main database with the .NET Core application. Before, I mainly used relational databases for a long time, and some NoSQL terms were confusing for me ..read more

Sometimes your code deals with a situation when things happen slowly. Maybe you schedule a background task that runs after some time. Or run a special action when asking for data that takes far too long. Either way, it is a tricky case that needs to be tested well. But what to do if we don’t want a test that waits a lot? Project Reactor, a reactive programming library for JVM, handles concurrency in a high-level and declarative fashion ..read more

If your Spring application uses MongoDB, there is one question you will have to answer at some point: how to set up a database instance for your tests. Until early 2020 there was not much choice and the default was to use ’embedded Mongo’ – my team was no exception. At some point, however, we realised that embedded Mongo was turning our builds into a nightmare. This ultimately prompted us to migrate our code to a tool getting much hype recently – Testcontainers ..read more

Using Reactive Programming is tempting because it promises to handle higher traffic on the same hardware. Yet this paradigm is also demanding: it increases code complexity and may make bugs harder to notice. Let’s explore how you can use Kotlin and coroutines to reduce the cognitive load of maintaining reactive applications. Sample code Imagine you are developing a website that can be used by both logged-in and anonymous users, just like Wikipedia ..read more

Spring is the most popular Java web framework for many years and Gradle has an established position as a build tool. You might expect it’s easy to find instructions on how to set up those two together — yet the Internet is filled with advice that will get you into trouble. The official Spring documentation does not make the situation any better in this case. Using Spring in your applications typically means your classpath contains not only Spring Framework itself, but also other Spring projects like Spring Security plus Spring dependencies that are independent libraries ..read more

For many developers, managing the environment required to work productively is a quite tedious task. Sure, the IDE does the lion’s share of preparations for you. But still, you need to install a specific version of the database, then make sure you have the right compiler and runtime environment. In some cases, you would also have to work on a given version of the operating system. Gods help you if you find yourself in the hell of “hidden” dependencies, like libraries you’re supposed to have installed separately ..read more