After founding Solidstudio, Pawel was an originator in terms of pursuing expertise in eMobility. With the build-up of a solid knowledge-base on industry’s needs & wants, he now keeps a close eye on products’ development. He’s also hugely responsible for the business’ side and designs the business models for our products.

Paweł Małkowiak

 , we have a lot of experience in working with Java that helps our clients create and expand their software products. Java is one of the most common and battle-tested technologies available on the market. That’s why so many companies choose it as part of their technology stack.

 is one of our best areas of expertise. Our software developers have helped companies across a wide range of industries to create solutions that solve problems and achieve tangible business results.

From enterprise-level software to reliable web applications, our experienced teams are ready to jump on any Java development project and lead it to success. Our Java programmers have years of coding experience and have worked in projects for various industries. They have built 

 tools to help our clients scale their operations.

Java is a robust language on its own, but it becomes even more powerful when combined with a framework. That way, Java serves as an optimal solution for applications in areas such as e-commerce, finance, cloud computing, stock market, and many others.

Why do experienced Java developers use frameworks? Frameworks offer a solid structure to applications. A framework helps to automate work, avoid building common functionalities from scratch, and get accurate and consistent results. Frameworks help developers to be more productive and focus on what matters most: the business logic and value of the software they’re building.

Although there are many frameworks built on Java, some are more common and appreciated than others. Each framework comes with its own benefits and works best for different use cases.

4 most important Java frameworks you need to know

By offering Dependency Injection and aspect-oriented programming, the open-source framework 

 gained incredible popularity among developers. Thanks to its robustness and features, it’s often used for building enterprise applications. Developers can use Spring to create loosely coupled modules where the dependencies are handled by the framework (instead of depending on the libraries in the code). The framework is comprehensive and includes many features that range from configuration security. Moreover, it has a gentle learning curve. No wonder that it’s the most popular web framework today, surrounded by extensive documentation and passionate community.

Another robust open-source framework for web applications written in Java. Apache Struts follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) model, extending the JSP API. The main perk of this framework is the easy set, as well as the flexibility and extensibility it offers over the traditional MVC approach that uses only servlets and JSP. Some say that if you’re looking to become a Java web developer, Struts is the best place to start.

 may not be a full-stack framework, but it had a great impact on how developers looked at the issue of databases in their Java projects. By implementing Java Persistence API (JPA), Hibernate becomes an Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) database for any Java application. And similarly to SQL, in Hibernate queries are called HQL (Hibernate Query Language). So what does the framework do? It maps Java classes directly to corresponding database tables (and vice versa). The main file (hibernate.cfg.xml) contains all of the information relevant to mapping Java classes with database configuration. Why is this important? Hibernate helps to solve two major problems with JDBC- the fact that it doesn’t support object-level relationships and older queries may work wrong upon migration to another database. This entails a lot of time and money invested in dealing with these issues. With Hibernate, development teams don’t need to worry about that. The framework offers an abstraction layer to allow the code to become loosely coupled with the database and takes care of tasks like establishing a database connection and performing CRUD. Results? Your code will become independent of the database used in the project.

Wicket will be an easy framework to learn for those who have already worked with JSP. Apache Wicket is a simple web application framework with a component-oriented structure. All you need to know to get started is Java and HTML. There’s no need to be proficient in topics such as XMLs or complex configuration files!

The main feature of Wicket? Developers use the framework thanks to the POJO model where components become simple (Plain Old) Java Objects that come with OOP features. Such components are bundled together to form reusable packages (complete with images, buttons, forms, links, pages, containers, behaviors and others). That way, development teams can customize them easily.

The main benefit of Wicket is that it’s light-weight and allows you to build and test applications really fast.

Choosing the right framework for a Java development project can be tricky. But experienced Java developers know the ins and outs of all the most important features of the market and will be able to advise you about the best choice for your unique project.

If your application doesn’t use the most recent version of Java, you don’t need to worry. Our experts can help you update your Java version easily so that your app takes advantage of all its features.

Migrating is never an easy decision. Many companies avoid it because migrations sometimes don’t offer clear advantages and carry substantial risks. The good news is that Oracle, the creator of Java, is now releasing new versions more frequently - but these versions contain smaller changes that aren’t that difficult to introduce.

Still, you don’t want to burden your in-house development team with the task of migration and block it from delivering value to the customers. That’s why it’s best to delegate the task to an external company like us. We can help you carry out a smooth migration and support you at every step of the way.

Are you looking for an experienced team of Java developers for your project? Do you need help in expanding your product with extra Java skills on board? Get in touch with us. We help companies all over the world to make the most of this incredibly powerful technology and realize their business goals efficiently.

Java is one of our best areas of expertise. Click to read and learn why. 

Paweł Baczyński

The Java platform comes with three key components: the Java Development Kit (JDK), the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). They’re a must-have in any project based on developing and running 

The Java Runtime Environment is software designed to help developers run other pieces of software. When developers need to execute a software program, they need an environment to run in. The runtime environment is responsible for loading class files and ensuring that the program can access memory and other system resources.

The Java Runtime Environment is a software layer that runs on top of a device’s operating system and provides additional services that are specific to Java. The runtime environment for Java includes the Java class libraries, Java class loader, and Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The class loader helps to correctly load classes and connect them to the core Java class libraries. Developers use the JVM for ensuring that their applications have the resources they require to run and perform well in devices or cloud environments. What about the JRE? It mainly acts as a container for the other components (and orchestrates their activities).

Thanks to JRE, developers can blur the diversity between different operating systems, ensuring that their software runs on any OS without modification.

One of the most important value-added services of JRE is automatic memory management. This ensures that developers don’t need to control the allocation and reallocation of memory manually.

The JRE includes integration libraries such as Java Database Connectivity and Java Naming and Directory Interface.

Java memory is made of three components: the heap, stack, and metaspace (called permgen until Java 8). The metaspace is where Java keeps the program's unchanging info (for example, class definitions). Heap space is where you’ll find variable content. Java stores function execution and variable references in the stack space.

Since Java 8, developers can take advantage of metaspace which introduced a significant change in how developers interact with the memory space of this programming language. Before, they would have to use the command java -XX:MaxPermSize to monitor the size of the space available in permgen. From Java 8, the technology is able to automatically increase the size of the metaspace to accommodate the meta-needs of software. Java 8 also introduced a brand-new flag called MaxMetaspaceSize, which development teams can use to limit the metaspace size.

Application monitoring is primarily a function of the Java Virtual Machine. However, the JRE also provides a range of configuration options that form the foundation for monitoring. Developers can use a variety of tools for monitoring Java applications, from simpler ones like the Unix command top to sophisticated solutions for remote monitoring (such as Oracle's infrastructure monitoring).

Moreover, programmers also get to benefit from visual profilers like VisualVM that allow inspecting a running JVM. Thanks to all of these tools, a development team can identify and track down hotspots and memory leaks, and monitor the overall memory consumption of your system.

Read about the benefits of Java Runtime Environment

Java Runtime Environment

See what's coming with the newest update of Java.

Java 14 release is scheduled for general 

 14 introduces three changes to the language and one useful feature for runtime:

Introducing Records to reduce the number of boilerplate code (preview)

Better debugging with more descriptive stack traces

In this article, we take a closer look at these new features to show you what to expect in Java 14. Two of them are preview features which means that they’re not permanent and may be changed or removed in future releases. You can enable preview features by using the following compiler flags:

There are several problems with the design of the existing switch statements which were taken from C and C++ languages. A new form of switch called switch expression was created to mitigate them.

The first problem with the old switch statement is that it uses fall through semantics. This means that the break statement must be used in the code..

By the way, did you notice a bug in the code? There is a missing break statement for the third quarter. When a programmer forgets the “break;” statement, they’re going to face a nasty bug. The switch expression uses an arrow notation (->) instead of the color (:) used by the older form. The above example can be rewritten to the new form like this:

Another issue is the scoping of variables. A variable declared in one case is in the scope of the entire switch statement.

This problem doesn’t exist in switch expression.

Also, until version 14 switch statements couldn't yield a value leading to constructs where a variable declaration is separated from the code that assigns a value.

In the case where more than one line is needed, all of them have to be included in curly braces. As all cases need to yield a value, we need to use the newly introduced yield statement. It must be the last statement in the block (similar to return in methods).

Note that yield is not a new keyword. It’s rather what we call a restricted identifier (similar to var). It can only exist at the end of the case branch. If it was a new keyword, a lot of the existing code would be broken - including the JDK itself -> Thread. yield().

From time to time, a Java developer needs to use the intanceof operator. If this is the case, usually a cast to a given type follows right away:

This is too verbose (note that BigDecimal is repeated three times). Pattern matching allows declaring a binding variable (big) that relates to a predicate (number instanceof BigDecimal)

Isn't it cleaner? The binding variable can also be used in the same if condition:

 14, the only predicate supported for pattern matching is instanceof check, but future releases are expected to extend the set of supported predicates.

Java Records to get rid of boilerplatecode

Did I mention verbose code? Imagine that you need a class that groups just two fields (first and last name). To make this class complete, you’d have to generate an enormous amount of code.

Records to the rescue! With a simple declaration like this:

We can omit all of the required boilerplate code. The Java compiler will generate a constructor, private final fields, accessors, equals/hashCode and toString methods automatically. We could also solve this issue by using 

 @Value annotation. It will be great when it will be possible to do it in the JDK itself without resorting to third party libraries.

The generated class can be examined with javap:

There are two differences between the class and the record from the example above.

First, the accessors are named exactly as the fields, so it's firstName() instead of getFirstName(). Not much can be done about this. To accommodate it, a number of libraries need to be updated.

Second, the record implementation does no checks in the generated constructor. Here some things can be changed. It’s possible to modify the generated constructor like in this example:

Note that the construction declaration doesn’t declare any parameter list, not even empty parentheses.

You can also add other methods like constructors as well as initialization blocks or static fields. However, you can use no member fields other than in the record declaration. Also, records must not extend any class. They implicitly extend java.lang.Record.

A perceptive reader may have noticed that the Person record wasn’t declared as final while the class was final. There’s no difference here. In the case of records, they are final by default.

The purpose of records is to serve as value classes. Please don’t abuse them by declaring a service class as record. ;)

It’s interesting that this time, Java architects didn’t introduce a new keyword (like they did when enums were added). So, no existing code using the record as an identifier will be broken.

. Rather, it’s a change to the runtime environment. It allows for easier spotting of a cause to a 

. It's disabled by default (for performance reasons, among other things). The feature can be useful in debugging. To enable it, the Java process has to be started with option

Let’s see it in action. There is a line of code that causes 

It shows which line caused the exception, but which method call? Not that helpful. Using the new feature we can get this stack trace:

Now everything is clear. The value of object.a().b().c() is null and this is the reason for error. This also works for arrays of arrays.

Currently stacktrace would look like this:

And with descriptive stack traces enabled:

Again, this is a lot more useful as it clearly points to the part of the code that causes the problem.

The features added to respond to programmers' needs. They’ll make working with Java easier as they allow to reduce the need for boilerplate code. Pattern matching for instanceof doesn’t seem like an important change but it’s a start to adding pattern matching to other places. Records look like a little revolution that should have been added a long time ago. I hope these features will soon move out of the preview stage and into the stable set of features.

The release of Java 14 brings some other changes as well. Some of them affect garbage collection, removing deprecated tools, etc. For a full list of features, visit this 

Java 14 new features

Take advantage over your competitors with cloud

Being a co-founder of Solidstudio, Paweł has got to see all the development phases. He’s a skilled professional with years of experience, both in the software and in the eMobility worlds.

Paweł Głogowski

At first glance, you may think that the e-commerce market has reached its maximum limit and there is no way to grow. However, by using new technologies companies can still increase their revenue - for example, by providing better recommendations or creating more attractive and user-friendly websites.

In this article, I will focus on describing new trends and technologies that help to improve e-commerce businesses. I won’t focus on Big Data technologies that are vital for e-commerce, but instead turn to the cloud technologies, Java, and Node.js.

There are always new trends emerging in online shopping on the e-commerce scene. First is using technologies that offer a literally one-click purchasing method that is quick but also safe. E-commerce ventures are also very interested in artificial intelligence (AI) - it includes chatbots or automatic customer service processes. AI is becoming more and more popular since it can easily interact with customers and facilitate the buying process. The last huge trend in online marketing is Machine Learning that helps profile the user experience for each individual buyer. However, it seems that e-commerce business won’t be able to achieve any of above if they don’t migrate their solution to the cloud.

One of the main problems in e-commerce business is its seasonality. There are some times during the year where the demand for online shopping rises - like Christmas or Black Friday. Companies used to lose billions of dollars because they couldn’t handle the increased volume of transactions. On the other hand, investing in architecture that will be used only for a couple of days during whole year isn’t very efficient. So is there a way to handle that situation? Yes - and the answer is the Cloud!

On AWS, it is possible to improve your architecture based on the current demand and then reduce it when it’s no longer required. This process is completely automated and adjusted to demand. It's very convenient and can help companies to save a tons of money. You can compare it to paying for electricity - you just pay for how much you consumed. You do not need to maintain and pay for servers on the virtual machine when you actually don’t need them.

Moving an e-commerce solution to cloud is also beneficial for other reasons. If your e-commerce solution is hosted on-premise, you need to deal with lot of additional problems like storing, maintaining and securing physical machines. Additionally, you should update software on a regular basis. Experience shows that it usually does not happen and sooner or later you end up with outdated software and less-than-expected availability. Also, you need more resources to maintain all servers. The cloud, on the other hand, is free from these issues. You need to set up your architecture once and then focus on developing software to meet the changing requirements. Your team won’t have to implement solutions like autoscaling or security backups since they are already provided by AWS.

At Solidstudio Software House, we have a lot of experience in moving monolith applications into the cloud, and maintaining and managing them accordingly. We are familiar with AWS solutions that can help your business grow.

Why Java is a great option for ecommerce?

Each branch of e-commerce is different and needs to face different problems. In e-commerce, there are many problems to solve. You will have problems with performance if you plan to sell a lot of cheap products relying on the scale of your project. However, if you plan to sell few but very expensive and luxury products then you need to rely on marketing and relations with customers. Each of these approaches requires different tools.

Java supports a lot of different frameworks which solve these problems. If you are an omnichannel company that needs complex tools for marketing or a CRM solution with customers, you may pick Hybris. If your company is smaller and you just need some basic support for orders or payments, you can choose one of the dozens available e-commerce solutions.

Java as a language that can also bring a lot of benefit for your company. It offers a lot of well-established tools, there are already many engineers who know how to use Java, the language itself is developed and updated accordingly to worldwide trends. That popularity makes it really easy to integrate Java tools with various solutions. The only drawback I can see from using Java as an e-commerce business is that for a very small scale it can be a little overkill. If you need to set up a small online shop, then using Java along with frameworks can end up becoming too costly. Consider using other languages to avoid following some Java conventions that are not feasible to all solutions.

Java is our main expertise at Solidstudio Software House and we already integrate our clients’ applications with dozens of third-party solutions, not only from the e-commerce field. We can help you choose the best option for your needs and integrate it with selected solutions seamlessly.

Node.js as a great tool for smaller scale.

If you do not need a complex CRM tool or support for online marketing and your business is rather small, you can start with some basic solutions based on Node.js. It uses Javascript for both the server and client side which can be beneficial since you need only experts with one programming language skills. It also offers great performance, so the costs of Node.js solutions are rather low. The existing Node.js frameworks like vue.js or koa.js can be really helpful for solving e-commerce problems. Node.js is a great tool to implement an MVP solution, however once your scale grows and you will need more complex tools and frameworks, we recommend switching to Java and one of its frameworks.

E-commerce has still a huge potential for growth and there is a lot of challenges that e-commerce ventures will have to face in the future. Technology can be a great support in achieving more, so keep a close eye on the cloud revolution. If you waste your time on outdated solutions, you will surely lose with your competitors. Start to move into cloud and use available tools wisely to be two steps ahead!

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AWS and Java - a good duo for your ecommerce environment

Java Software Development Services

28 MARCH 2020 • 9 MIN READ