Last week I showed you how to increase the performance of multiple java calls by making them asynchronous and parallel. This week we take a look at another potential performance booster, you should always keep in mind - caching.

Let’s imagine a scenario where you call a REST service and you know the returned values don’t change very often. In this case you really need to consider caching the response. We will use Guava’s provided caching capabilities to implement such a cache for this example.

Some time ago I wrote how elegant and rapid is to make parallel calls in NodeJS with async-await and Promise.all capabilities. Well, it turns out in Java is just as elegant and succinct with the help of CompletableFuture which was introduced in Java 8. To demonstrate that let’s imagine that you need to retrieve a list of ToDos from a REST service, given their Ids. Of course you could iterate through the list of Ids and sequentially call the web service, but it’s much more performant to do it in parallel with asynchronous calls.

I have a use case where I need to retrieve the latest public bookmarks public added on www.codever.land. They are store in a mongo database, and I use Mongoose as ORM.

I want to have two possibilites to achieve this:

1. specify the number of days to look back
2. specify the timestamp since when to look forward

I think the code is self explanatory

/**
 * Returns the bookmarks added recently.
 *
 * The since query parameter is a timestamp which specifies the date since we want to look forward to present time.
 * If this parameter is present it has priority. If it is not present, we might specify the number of days to look back via
 * the query parameter numberOfDays. If not present it defaults to 7 days, last week.
 *
 */
router.get('/latest-entries', async (req, res) => {
  try
  {

    if(req.query.since) {
      const bookmarks = await Bookmark.find(
        {
          createdAt: { $gte: new Date(parseFloat(req.query.since,0)) }
        }).sort({createdAt: 'desc'}).lean().exec();

      res.send(bookmarks);
    } else {
      const numberOfDaysToLookBack = req.query.days ? req.query.days : 7;

      const bookmarks = await Bookmark.find(
        {
          createdAt: { $gte: new Date((new Date().getTime() - (numberOfDaysToLookBack * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000))) }
        }).sort({createdAt: 'desc'}).lean().exec();

      res.send(bookmarks);
    }

  }
  catch (err)
  {
    return res.status(500).send(err);
  }
});

Did you find yourself one or several times, copying your favourite java project, renaming it, removing files, keeping some best practice classes and so on, all that to create new projects similar to it? This is time consuming and can be very annoying… Well, you might wanna consider instead creating a maven archetype out of the template project and use to create new projects. Not only this will save you time, but it will make you look with a more critical view on your “best of breed” project. In this blog post I will show how to create a maven archetype based on an existing project and how to generate a new project from this template.

Some days ago, I presented how the code got much cleaner when I replaced Mongoose callbacks with the async-await feature from ES7, which NodeJs already support. I mentioned then, I was gonna do a post to demonstrate how async-await can also be used to make parallel calls. Here am I doing just that. I was actually blown away by its simplicity and performance gain when doing so. Let me show you what I mean.