This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Seminda who has been experimenting with how to create simple and powerful web applications. Thank you for showing me your ideas and discussing improvements with me, Seminda.

I find many C# applications have much unnecessary code. This is especially true as the weight of the business logic of many applications are shifting from the backend to JavaScript code in the web pages. When the job of your application is to provide data to a front-end, it’s important to keep it slim.

In this article, I set out to simplify a standard MVC 4 API controller by generalizing the functionality, centralizing exception handling and adding extension methods to the DB set that is used to fetch my data.

In this post I will present how to build a simple reference data cache in Java EE, using singleton EJBs and Ehcache. The cache will reset itself after a given period of time, and can be cleared “manually” by calling a REST endpoint or a MBean method. This post actually builds on a previous post How to build and clear a reference data cache with singleton EJBs and MBeans; the only difference is that instead of the storing of the data in a ConcurrentHashMap<String, Object> I will be using an Ehcache cache, and the cache is able to renew itself by Ehcache means.

In this article we will see how to configure and integrate SpringMVC4, Spring Data JPA with Hibernate and SpringSecurity using JavaConfig.

1. Pom.xml

First let’s configure all the necessary dependencies in pom.xml

ORM has a simple, production-ready solution hiding in plain sight in the Java world. Let’s go through it in this post, alongside with the following topics:

• ORM / Hibernate in 2014 – the word on the street
• ORM is still the Vietnam of Computer Science
• ORM has 2 main goals only
• When does ORM make sense?
• A simple solution for the ORM problem
• A production-ready ORM Java-based alternative

Jetty 9.1 is finally released, bringing Java WebSockets (JSR-356) to non-EE environments. It’s awesome news and today’s post will be about using this great new API along with Spring Framework.

JSR-356 defines concise, annotation-based model to allow modern Java web applications easily create bidirectional communication channels using WebSockets API. It covers not only server-side, but client-side as well, making this API really simple to use everywhere.