After a 13 months development phase and 208 solved tickets, it is my pleasure to announce general availability of Lettuce 5.0. This is a major release coming with several breaking changes and new interesting features and Java 9 compatibility.

Get the release from Maven Central

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.lettuce</groupId>
    <artifactId>lettuce-core</artifactId>
    <version>5.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

or download the release bundle from GitHub.

I released today logstash-gelf 1.11.1. This release fixes a bunch of bugs and brings minor enhancements.

The Lettuce driver project graduates after three years now to a top-level project.

It has been three years now since I took over the Lettuce driver project whereas I wanted initially just fix a bug – so to say scratch my own itch I had in an other project. I published Lettuce under biz.paluch.redis:lettuce in June 2014 for the first time, and so I became the maintainer of Lettuce. The original driver was used to be quite popular until its maintenance stopped in 2013 and adoption of my fork began slowly.

Heckenlights is an interactive Christmas lights installation that can be controlled online by just visiting heckenlights.org. Heckenlights consists of over 3000 LED lights that are controlled via MIDI in 12 tracks. Each MIDI note switches the lights on and off.

It all started in 2012 with the idea to control a Relay with MIDI and lead to what it is today. Now, this season is the last one for Heckenlights. It’s been a great fun building Heckenlights and even more stepping outside, opening heckenlights.org on a smartphone and triggering the lights to play.

I’m moving next year to a new house. Heckenlights (originating from Heckenpfad, the address I live) is no more appropriate then.

You can see and operate Heckenlights until Jan 6th, 2017 between 5 pm and 10 pm (CET). After that date, it will be shut down.

Resources:

• midi-relay at Github
• Heckenlights at Github

Redis is a data store supporting over 190 documented commands and over 450 command permutations. The community supports actively Redis development; each major Redis release comes with new commands. This year Redis was opened up for 3rd party vendors to develop modules that extend Redis functionality. Command growth and keeping track with upcoming modules are challenging for client developers and Redis users.

I just released lettuce 4.2.2.Final.

This is a bugfix release that fixes several issues. Updating is recommended for
setups with frequent reconnects or frequent cluster topology changes during runtime.

This post explains the use of a pooled GZIP OutputStream. The initial motivation were performance measurements of the GZIP'ing inside of logstash-gelf.

Passwords, API keys and confidential data fall into the category of secrets. Storing secrets the secure way is a challenge with limiting access and a true secure storage. Let’s take a look at Hashicorp Vault and how you can use it to store and access secrets.

Blue/Green deployments are a method of deploying with zero downtime. This is possible on Pivotal’s CloudFoundry using either the CLI, Maven, or Gradle. Matt Stine wrote earlier on this topic how to do blue/green deployments using the CLI.

The last two days, 08.03 - 09.03.2016, I attended JavaLand 2016. I was lucky having a talk about „What’s New in CDI 2.0“ and it was great for me. This year JavaLand came up with a Newcomer track for speakers that didn’t speak at a larger conference before. We were 10 speakers, each having a 20-minute slot.

This year JavaLand Keynote was more of an overview of the conference announcing 109 talks with over 390 submissions and about 30 Newcomer submissions of which 10 were accepted. Over 800 people attended the keynote.