Java has been one of the most widely used programming languages among developers worldwide for years. So naturally, it is a popular choice for those beginning their careers in development. Learning Java requires more than just knowing the proper syntax and effective code hygiene. Any developer who hopes to use Java for commercial development must be able to quickly and competently identify and recognize errors in their code.
Let’s look at IllegalArgumentException, which is one of the most common types of exceptions that Java developers deal with. We’ll see when and why IllegalArgumentException usually occurs, whether it’s a checked or unchecked exception, as well as how to catch and when to throw it. We’ll use a few examples based on common Java library methods to describe some of the ways to handle IllegalArgumentException.
The Java Collections Framework was a huge leap forward when it was introduced as part of Java 2 (JDK 1.2). Thanks to the included collection classes we finally moved beyond the limits of Vector and Hashtable to more mature and generic solutions. With the introduction of streams and functional concepts in Java 8 the framework took everything to the next level. One of the core principles underlying the framework is coding to the interface.
In a previous blog post, Adam Quan presented a great introduction to setting up observability for a Spring Boot application. For metrics, Adam used the Prometheus Java Client library and showed how to link metrics and traces using exemplars. However, the Prometheus Java Client library is not the only way to get metrics out of a Spring Boot app. One alternative is to use the OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation agent for exposing Spring’s metrics directly in OpenTelemetry format.
The Java programming language is simple to learn and use, and it is frequently used by web developers to create applications. However, monitoring the performance of a Java-based application might be difficult because it is not a simple process. Implementing multiple monitoring tools to track Java logs, metrics, infrastructure data, and other operational factors is necessary for troubleshooting inefficiencies.
The Java Message Service API (JMS) was developed by Sun Microsystems in the days of Java EE. The JMS API provides us with simple messaging abstractions including Message Producer, Message Consumer, etc. Messaging APIs let us place a message on a “queue” and consume messages placed into said queue. This is immensely useful for high throughput systems – instead of wasting user time by performing a slow operation in real-time, an enterprise application can send a message.
Spring makes building a reliable application much easier thanks to its declarative transaction management. It also supports programmatic transaction management, but that’s not as common. In this article, I want to focus on the declarative transaction management angle, since it seems much harder to debug compared to the programmatic approach. This is partially true. We can’t put a breakpoint on a transactional annotation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Some months ago we wrote a quick guide on how to use Sentry with Spring Boot and Logback. Since then, we’ve continued working on improving the development experience, added several features for error reporting and, most importantly, implemented the performance feature in Sentry Java SDK with a dedicated integration with Spring MVC. If you haven’t yet used Sentry in a Spring Boot application - nothing to worry about - you will find all the necessary steps below.
