Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.
Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.
Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.
Distributed systems often come with complex challenges such as service-to-service communication, state management, asynchronous messaging, security, and more.
Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) provides a set of APIs and building blocks to address these challenges, abstracting away infrastructure so we can focus on business logic.
In this tutorial, we'll focus on Dapr's pub/sub API for message brokering. Using its Spring Boot integration, we'll simplify the creation of a loosely coupled, portable, and easily testable pub/sub messaging system:
1. Overview
In this short article, we’re going to look at similarities and differences between StringBuilder and StringBuffer in Java.
Simply put, StringBuilder was introduced in Java 1.5 as a replacement for StringBuffer.
2. Similarities
Both StringBuilder and StringBuffer create objects that hold a mutable sequence of characters. Let’s see how this works, and how it compares to an immutable String class:
String immutable = "abc";
immutable = immutable + "def";Even though it may look like that we’re modifying the same object by appending “def”, we are creating a new one because String instances can’t be modified.
When using either StringBuffer or StringBuilder, we can use the append() method:
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("abc");
sb.append("def");In this case, there was no new object created. We have called the append() method on sb instance and modified its content. StringBuffer and StringBuilder are mutable objects.
3. Differences
StringBuffer is synchronized and therefore thread-safe. StringBuilder is compatible with StringBuffer API but with no guarantee of synchronization.
Because it’s not a thread-safe implementation, it is faster and it is recommended to use it in places where there’s no need for thread safety.
3.1. Performance
In small iterations, the performance difference is insignificant. Let’s do a quick micro-benchmark with JMH:
@State(Scope.Benchmark)
public static class MyState {
int iterations = 1000;
String initial = "abc";
String suffix = "def";
}
@Benchmark
public StringBuffer benchmarkStringBuffer(MyState state) {
StringBuffer stringBuffer = new StringBuffer(state.initial);
for (int i = 0; i < state.iterations; i++) {
stringBuffer.append(state.suffix);
}
return stringBuffer;
}
@Benchmark
public StringBuilder benchmarkStringBuilder(MyState state) {
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(state.initial);
for (int i = 0; i < state.iterations; i++) {
stringBuilder.append(state.suffix);
}
return stringBuilder;
}We have used the default Throughput mode – i.e. operations per unit of time (higher score is better), which gives:
Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units
StringBufferStringBuilder.benchmarkStringBuffer thrpt 200 86169.834 ± 972.477 ops/s
StringBufferStringBuilder.benchmarkStringBuilder thrpt 200 91076.952 ± 2818.028 ops/sIf we increase the number of iterations from 1k to 1m then we get:
Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units
StringBufferStringBuilder.benchmarkStringBuffer thrpt 200 77.178 ± 0.898 ops/s
StringBufferStringBuilder.benchmarkStringBuilder thrpt 200 85.769 ± 1.966 ops/sHowever, let’s bear in mind that this is a micro-benchmark, which may or may not have a real impact on the actual, real-world performance of an application.
4. Conclusions
Simply put, the StringBuffer is a thread-safe implementation and therefore slower than the StringBuilder.
In single-threaded programs, we can take of the StringBuilder. Yet, the performance gain of StringBuilder over StringBuffer may be too small to justify replacing it everywhere. It’s always a good idea to profile the application and understand its runtime performance characteristics before doing any kind of work to replace one implementation with another.
