Java

Dropwizard allows developers to quickly bootstrap their projects and package applications as easily deployable standalone services. It also happens to be relatively simple to use and implement.

In this tutorial, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Dusan Simonovic will introduce you to Dropwizard and demonstrate how you can use this powerful framework to create RESTful web services with ease.

Understanding the Input/Output (I/O) model of your application can mean the difference between an application that deals with the load it is subjected to, and one that crumples in the face of real-world uses cases. Perhaps while your application is small and does not serve high loads, it may matter far less. But as your application’s traffic load increases, working with the wrong I/O model can get you into a world of hurt.

Natural language is increasingly becoming a viable way of interacting with smart software. Google search, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, etc. are all capable of understanding queries in natural language.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Shanglun (Sean) Wang walks us through some useful concepts and techniques in natural language processing and shows how they can be used to build a simple NLP app.

Java’s open source Spring framework is a popular tool for creating high performing applications using plain old Java objects, but as with any tool, inappropriate use can lead to trouble. In this article, we cover the most common pitfalls of using the Spring framework so new and experienced developers alike have a roadmap of what to avoid.

Java has some idiosyncrasies of its own and design choices that can make it rather verbose. While Java is a mature and performant programming language, developers frequently need to write boilerplate code that bring little or no real value other than complying with some set of constraints and conventions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Miguel García López shows how Project Lombok can help dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written in a Java application.

Using Mockito is not just a matter of adding another dependency. It requires changing how you think about your unit tests while removing a lot of boilerplate. In this article, we cover multiple mock interfaces, listening invocations, matchers, and argument captors, and see firsthand how Mockito makes your tests cleaner and easier to understand.

Automated software tests are critically important to the long-term quality, maintainability, and extensibility of software projects, and for Java, JUnit is the path to automation.

While most of this article will focus on writing robust unit tests and utilizing stubbing, mocking, and dependency injection, Toptal Software Engineer Josh Hayden will also discuss JUnit and integration tests.

Are you building the next big thing? Planning to become the next Facebook or Google? Are you at the point of making fundamental decisions that will stay with you for the entire project? There is a good chance that you will pick a robust language like Java. If so, you want to pick the best object-oriented abstraction of your flexible data model because you don’t want to deal with plain SQL. You want to support all kinds of data and ideally, support all kind of databases. If so, there’s only one right choice for you: Hibernate.

Freelance Software Engineer Grzegorz Gajos explores some possible scenarios where things can go wrong using Hibernate.

Implementing applications that deal with complex concurrent behavior has always been a challenging aspect of programming. Various paradigms exist that promise a solution to this problem in different ways. RxJava is a Java library that enables Functional Reactive Programming in Android development. It raises the level of abstraction around threading in order to simplify the implementation of complex concurrent behavior.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Christopher Arriola gives us a detailed walkthrough of RxJava and how it fits into the realm of Android development.