hattery VS Arthur

While I think there's a lot to love about Java, I think the standard library itself is not an especially great role model. Most of it was written a long time ago and has a fairly antiquated style - lots of mutable state, nullability, and checked exceptions. Not that the library isn't an incredible asset - it's luxuriously rich compared to working in Node.js - but if it were written from scratch today, I suspect it would look fairly different. Eg, the collection classes would use Optional and have separate read/write interfaces.

For an example of "modern Java" I would point at something like this (which I wrote, sorry about the hubris):

https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery

I have been thinking of writing up a series of articles on this. Without going into too much detail:

* IDEA

* Deploy on Google App Engine, Digital Ocean App Platform, Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, etc - get out of the ops business entirely.

* Guice as the backbone, no Spring/Boot. I wrote a tiny dropwiard-like "framework" to make this easier: https://github.com/gwizard/gwizard but there's a laughable amount of code here, you could build it all from scratch with minimal effort. This is about as lightweight as "frameworks" get because Guice does the heavy lifting.

* JAX-RS (Resteasy) for the web API. IMO this is the best part of Java web development. HTTP endpoints are simple synchronous Java methods (with a few annotations) and you can test them like simple Java methods.

* Lombok. Use @Value heavily. Cuts most of the boilerplate out of Java.

* Junit5 + AssertJ. (Or Google Truth, which is almost identical to AssertJ).

* Use functional patterns. Try to make all variables and fields final. Use collections streams heavily. Consider vavr.io (I'll admit I haven't it in anger yet, but I would in a new codebase).

* StreamEx. Adds a ton of useful stream behavior; I don't even use basic streams anymore.

* Guava. There's just a lot of useful stuff here.

* For the database, it really depends on what you're building. Most generic business apps, postgres/hibernate/guice-persist/flyway. Yeah, folks complain about hibernate a lot but it's a decent way to map to objects. Use SQL/native queries, don't bother with JPQL, criteria queries, etc.

* Hattery for making http requests (https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery). This is another one of mine. I make zillions of http requests, functional/immutable ergonomics really matter to me.

* Github actions for CI.

* Maven for the build. Yes, it's terrible, except for every other build system is worse. Gradle seems like it should be better but isn't. I'd really love some innovation here. Sigh.

I can't stand most http libraries (full of mutable state!) and I spend a lot of time making http calls. So I built a functional/immutable http request library which has been dramatically improving my personal quality of life for about 7 years now. No idea if anyone else uses it, but it doesn't really matter.

Java version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery

Typescript version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hatteryjs

Here are three hobby projects I've worked on during the last 2 years. I've written extensive guides for all of them:

https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-CNC-machine A CNC-machine I built from scratch, using 40x 3d-printed parts.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade A full-size Arcade Machine I built from scratch.

Here you have the complete electronic setup: https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur#electronic-components

When I set out to learn new skills, I usually try to wrap them in a project. I also try to document and open-source the whole process, both for my own learning, but to enable other to leverage my failures and learnings.

Here are the projects I've done so far:

https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor (including, code, images and tutorial). The main draft is almost done, but quite some polishing to do.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/shibusa An automatic Zen Garden drawing infinite patterns in sand. Using stepper motors, inverse kinematics and a Raspberry Pi Zero W (including, code, images and tutorial). I'm almost done building the robot, but still have quite some implementation to do. Also, the guide is far from done, I've mostly uploaded images so far.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade A full-size Arcade Machine I built from scratch (including, code, images and tutorial). I don't know where you draw the life of "half baked". It's done, but there's a lot of improvements that can be done.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor (including, code, images and tutorial). The main draft is almost done, but quite some polishing to do.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/shibusa An automatic Zen Garden drawing infinite patterns in sand. Using stepper motors, inverse kinematics and a Raspberry Pi Zero W (including, code, images and tutorial). I'm almost done building the robot, but still have quite some implementation to do. Also, the guide is far from done, I've mostly uploaded images so far.

https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur