Thoughts on agile software development
Jens 
It is always instructive to look at well-known open source projects to learn from the implementation used. Sometimes you look at the unit tests and start to wonder. A serious problem with large and old frameworks is the time-consuming adaptation to changing environments. Modern features in libraries such as JUnit 5 simplify the code base immensely.
Since the introduction of Java Records in Java 14 (JEP 359), their support in many frameworks has continued to grow. Support is now so great that we should consider banning Lombok from all our projects.
Some additions to a framework are so trivial that they don’t really deserve their own article. On the other hand, as a developer, you may ask yourself why this addition has taken so long. For unknown data types, FreshMarker uses the interpretation of the class as a Java Bean by default. This is a good solution for many POJO, DTO and Entity classes, but in some cases the class should be used as a primitive FreshMarker type.
The Rocinante library has now passed some important milestones. It can read and write messages and masters the scalar base types. The next step is now to support Repeated Fields. Repeated fields are the Protocol Buffer counterpart to lists and arrays in other protocols.
After the Rocinante project has mastered some basic functionalities of Protocol Buffer, the project automation is now to be improved by a Maven plugin.
When storing data, their temporal changes are often not sufficiently taken into account. The following example of a club member database shows the problems of simplified temporal data storage and the advantages of bitemporal data storage.
Sometimes even developers want to present something. It’s nice when there’s a tool that picks up the developers in their comfort zone. Software developers are a special clientele and have very specific requirements for a software solution for creating and giving presentations.
The third article on Rocinante finally deals with the interesting part of the protocol. How the parts of a message are encoded into the binary Protocol Buffer representation and decoded again. Rocinante uses a two-stage approach. The basis is formed by a ProtoInputStream and a ProtoOutputStream, in which the basic mechanisms are implemented. For each message a generated Proto class with individual read and write methods is based on this.
In the first article on Project Rocinante, we discussed the processing of Protocol Buffer definition files with CongoCC. In this post we will create the first Java classes based on this definitions.
For a software developer who wants to improve his own skills, it is always helpful to try out new topics. A nice side effect of such small projects is that you always get new material for articles like this one.