From Hell To Heaven: Increase app’s performance with Redis

Welcome to my new series “From Hell To Heaven“. These series will be about different cases of programmers dealing with issues that anyone can find in a typical day. In this first post, we will be implementing Redis as a second level cache layer using Spring Boot.

Introduction

I have been working on a couple of projects and encountered several performance issues. This issue relied mostly on reading the same data multiple times in the same endpoint. Using second layer cache is a common solution to this issue and that’s what we are going to do today! You will see how easy it will be to integrate Redis as a cache layer using Spring boot.

What is Redis?

Redis is an in-memory data structure used as a database or cache. Being in-memory provides a huge benefit in performance; reading and writing are way faster than persisting to disk. It also provides a way of persisting data utilizing RDB and AOF, making it perfect to keep the data when restarting the server.

Implementation

Dependencies and Configuration

Your project will need spring-boot-starter-data-redis dependency in order to work properly with Spring Boot. Then we need to configure Redis and the cache, which is fairly easy to do it by taking advantage of Spring Boot’s auto configuration as shown in the following segment:

spring.redis.url=redis://user:password@example.com:6379 spring.redis.host=localhost # Redis server host. spring.redis.password= # Login password of the redis server. Leave empty if no password spring.redis.port=6379 # Redis server port. spring.cache.type=redis spring.cache.redis.cache-null-values=true # Allow caching null values. spring.cache.redis.key-prefix=project_key # Key prefix. spring.cache.redis.time-to-live=60000ms # Entry expiration. By default the entries never expire. spring.cache.redis.use-key-prefix=true # Whether to use the key prefix when writing to Redis. Read more...

Binary Search | Search Algorithm

The theory

A binary search algorithm is a search algorithm that uses the concept of divide and conquer in order to find a target value’s position. Basically, this search algorithm compares the target value with the middle element of the collection.

If it is equal, return the position. If it is not equal, then we will need to check if the value is either greater or less than the target value. This is to know what side of the collection we need to split.

Binary Search Requirements

There’s a condition applied to the binary search array, which is that the array must be sorted. This is because it uses the value (in our case an integer), to compare and check if the selected position has the target value or check where to go.

Binary Search Array Algorithm

Implementation

First things first, we will create our binary search class with the search methods.

public class BinarySearch {

public int search(int[] array, int number) {
return search(array, number, 0, array.length);
}

private int search(int[] array, int target, int start, int end) {
int mid = (start + end) / 2;

if (end < start) {
return -1;
}

if (array[mid] == target) {
return mid;
} else if (array[mid] > target) {
return search(array, target, 0, mid - 1);
} else {
return search(array, target, mid + 1, end);
}
}
}

Read more...

Modifying and Updating a JAR File| Java

A Brief Introduction…

It all started when a co-worker asked for help when trying to update an IP Address of a java API, however, he only had the JAR file available. With another co-worker, we dug up the internet and tried to find a way to do this, and we finally did. I thought of sharing what we acquire for any future help.

Requirements

In order to do any of the operations mentioned in the title, you will need to have java and JDK installed, a desired jar you want to modify, and basic knowledge of commands for the terminal. In order to get the .java file from the JAR, I would recommend a program called JD-GUI. You will just need to open the jar file, and look for a desired file and save it.

JAR Process

For this tutorial, we will be using the linked list jar we created in another tutorial. As we open the jar file with JD-GUI, I will choose to add another constructor in the Node.java class.

jd-gui-node

After saving it, we will be opening and modifying the java class with your favorite Java Editor. If you noticed, a jar is composed of .class files, which contains pure byte code and we wouldn’t be able to read it that easy. We will convert the .java file to .class through the command line and with the javac command: javac Node.java

javac

Note: I am following the same folder structure as the JAR file. linkedlist>Node.class.

Until now, we have modified and generated the Node.class file, so we are just missing update the current file in the JAR. In order to do this, we will need to use the jar uvf command: jar uvf LinkedList.jar linkedlist/Node.class. The -u in the command means that we will be updating/inserting a specific file inside the JAR.

jd-uvr-java

Ta-da! You just have modified and update a JAR file in a very simple way. Please open the jar file using JD-GUI again and check if the changes were done correctly.

jd-gui-working

If you wish to extract a specific file without requiring JD-GUI, it will be with using the -x argument within the jar command: jar xvf LinkedList.jar linkedlist/Node.class .

I hope you have learned how to modify and update any JAR file. Please let me know if you have any other further questions or comments.

Linked List | Data Structures

A brief introduction

Linked List is a linear collection of objects, which is composed of nodes pointing to the next node. Each node contains a value and a reference to the next node in the sequence. Most of the operations applied in a linked list (add, remove, search, etc.) will require sequencial scanning most of the time.

single-linked-list
As you can notice, each node will always have a pointer to the next node and a value, this is called a single linked list. If a node has a link to the previous and to the next one, it is called a double linked list or a circular linked list.

Implementation

The first step will be creating a node class:

public class Node<T>{

    private Node next;
    private T value;

    public Node(){
        
    }
    
    public Node(T value){
        this.value = value;
    }
    
    public Node getNext() {
        return next;
    }

    public void setNext(Node next) {
        this.next = next;
    }

    public T getValue() {
        return value;
    }

    public void setValue(T value) {
        this.value = value;
    }
}

This is a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) of a Node class, which contains a value and another Node that will be the “Next” node. If you ask yourself about the “T” I have in there, I am declaring the Node class as Generic, enabling the option to choose what datatype to use. Now, we will be creating varios operations used, starting with the add.

public class MyLinkedList<T>{

private Node head;
private static int counter;

public void add(T value){

if (head == null) {
head = new Node(value);
} else {
Node temp = new Node(value);
Node current = head;

while (current.getNext() != null) {
current = current.getNext();
}

current.setNext(temp);
}

counter++;
}
}
Read more...