ByThorben JanssenShould you expose your entities in your REST API, or should you prefer to serialize and deserialize DTO classes?That’s one of the most commonly asked questions when I’m talking to developers or when I’m coaching teams who are working on a new application. There are two main reasons for these questions and all the discussions…
ByThorben JanssenWhen I shared last week’s article about implementing the fluent interface pattern on twitter, I got asked about using the builder pattern for your entities. Implementing the builder pattern for your entities can massively improve the readability of your business code. In contrast to the fluent interface pattern, there is nothing in the JPA specification…
ByThorben JanssenFluent interfaces are a popular API design pattern in the Java world. The goal of the pattern is to create APIs that are very easy to read, and that define something similar to a domain-specific language. To achieve that, the API heavily relies on method chaining so that the code that uses the API flows…
ByThorben JanssenMost developers use enums in their domain models. You can easily map them with Hibernate. They provide a strongly typed way to model an attribute that has one out of a list of defined values. The format of a book is a typical example of such an enum. Supported values could be hardcover, paperback, and…
ByThorben JanssenDatabases use the data types BLOB (binary large object) and CLOB (character large object) to store large objects, like images and very long texts. JPA and Hibernate provide two kinds of mappings for these types. You can choose if you want to: Materialize the LOB and map it to a byte[] or a String. This…