Spring Cloud AWS with proxy settings

In my previous article, Spring and Amazon Web Services, I provided a brief introduction to Spring Cloud AWS module and what you as a developer can expect from it at this point in time. One thing that is not obvious from the official documentation is how to use this module when your Internet connection is restricted by a proxy server. In this post I will outline how to approach passing of proxy configuration for both Java-based and XML-based configuration. This aspect of configuration will probably be addressed in the future releases however it might help you now in case you work with this module and need your application to work with a company proxy.
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Spring and Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (or AWS) is nowadays one of the most common choices of the infrastructure and hardware providers to use and deploy to. Many Spring applications have tackled challenges of integrating the application infrastructure and the underlying layer. These in-house solutions differ in complexity and the degree of sophistication when it comes to the design and the actual functionality. One of the key attributes of success of such a solution besides the proficiency of the team is the overall knowledge and experience with AWS Java SDK. Based on the way Spring Framework has been designed and maintained, it was only a matter of time before Spring introduced a module dedicated to bridging the gap between AWS and the way we configure our Spring applications. I want to discuss some aspects of adoption of this relatively new module in this post and also point out what to look forward to and what to watch out for.

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Testing your assumptions

If I were to list some of the most dangerous habits observed in the way programmers work, I would definitely put making assumptions on this list. Let me explain. Recently, I have been debugging this one unit test that was showing signs of being a false positive. Turns out I was right about that and the reason was really simple – someone made an assumption that turned out to be false.  Let’s face it – we have all been there at least once in our career (even once sounds too good to be true 🙂 ). We assumed that certain situation, outcome or combination of several factors is simply not going to occur only to receive a bug report confirming that this assumption was wrong. This often unconscious practice is really common and causes trouble all over the world.

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Build your own robot arm – remote control

In previous installment of this micro series, I discussed the way to control all the servos at once. Programmatically without any outside interaction. This just won’t do. Final step in this project is obviously remote control that is going to add another level of complexity and also fun. Join me and lets take a look at what it takes to hook this MeArm robot arm to PlayStation 4 controller. If you missed the introduction to programming of this arm check out my previous post Build your own robot arm – programming.

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