1 year TRIO-Blog – How it all started

Over the last 12 months, the team of authors has grown and the ideas for topics, implementation, structure and features have evolved.
In the meantime, the editorial calendar is well filled, not only with topics that we deal with in current projects, but also with topics that we want to dive deeper into, which are worthwhile to discover. Thanks to the quality of the articles, the interest in writing has grown amongst our colleagues so that new faces have joint the team over the past year. Ultimately, it is mainly the perceptible interest of readers, which makes the success of such a medium. More and more frequently, there are inquiries from IT magazines that want to publish our blog articles – which naturally encourages us in our work and motivates us even more to continue with the our blog.

The blog serves the internal and external exchange of knowledge and at the same time reflects our values and our portfolio. Through the many practical examples, we want to communicate even complex topics in an understandable, intuitive and in a personal way.

So far, 28 articles have been published. Amongst others, we report on events, in which our colleagues participate as mentors, speakers or where they are part of a regulars’ IT round table that take place at our company. Beyond that, you can read about our methods and working principles, as well as our experience reports. Interviews with our experts on their presentations and published articles can be found in our blog, too.

Articles on the Java Platform were the most popular topic in our blog this year. As a kickoff, we started a series on the subject of “Annotation Processing”. We are looking forward to further parts that will extend this introduction. In another series, we’ve shown how to create a version name with Maven and to use a small library to use this version name with a line of code in the application.
On a short detour into the world of mobile, Java developers learn how to use SLF4J and Logback in Android.
On the Jenkins CI server you can finally write build jobs as code thanks to the pipeline plugin; we show how to get Code Completion for that. Next year, more articles on this topic are in the “pipeline”. Addtionally, you can use these pipelines to quickly automate the testing of their Java dependencies for security vulnerabilities.
Another best practice in the field of security is the use of a security framework such as Apache Shiro. We show how to implement complex authorization with Shiro.

In addition to the quality criterion security, we have also dealt with further topics in the category of Quality: The cutting-edge topics “Behavior Driven Development” and “Acceptance Testing”. They can be realized, for example, by using gauge.
One level closer to the code are unit tests, which can these days even be quality assured by means of mutation testing. The results of those tests of the tests can be available in SonarQube. This is important, because quality must be a measurable quantity and with SonarQube you can express all different kinds of figures with its static code analyses. In addition, the tool also helps to comply with code conventions. Code conventions in the Java environment are therefore an obvious topic. When it comes to databases, Code Conventions are called naming conventions. TRIOLOGY’s naming conventions for relational databases are now open source. These relational databases can be easily filled with Groovy DSL in Unit and Integration Testing. Even these databases are open source.

Even though there are so many interesting backend topics, we do not want to neglect the web category. For example, we show you how to create a web application with Yeoman quickly, which you can use right away to go through our multi-part AngularJS tutorial. AngularJS is still being further developed and used after the release of the new version (soon  Angular 5 will be released). If, after these finger excercises, you want to keep going on, you will find our overview of libraries for displaying diagrams with AngularJS very helpful.

All these technical topics mentioned above are relevant in our agile software development process. In this context, TRIOLOGY presents the models of Scrum or Kanban, gives recommendations on how to handle requirements and user stories in general, and demonstrates in concrete and practical terms how to support your requirements management with the Redmine tool.

Publications

Fortunately, some of our articles first appeared in trade journals:

> In Java aktuell 01/2017: Automatic checks for vulnerabilities in Java project dependencies

> In Java aktuell 03/2017: A Groovy DSL for the Creation of Test Data using JPA

> In Java aktuell 04/2017: Statistical Code Analysis with SonarQube und

> In Javamagazin 9.2017: SLF4J and Logback in Android.

The next publications have already been submitted!

As mentioned above, a number of open source projects and example repositories were created as part of the work on our blog articles on the GitHub organization of TRIOLOGY GmbH. TRIOLOGY GmbH now operates an instance of the CI server Jenkins, especially for its open source projects, in order to further develop this on a professional level.

Fun facts:

Number of articles > 28 articles (in German and English)

Number of words > about 76.000 words

Number of page calls > about 10.000 page calls

Number of authors > 12 authors