Category: Java

MongoDB Atlas SDK: A Modern Toolkit

Lately, I’ve been diving into the MongoDB Atlas SDK, and it’s clear that this tool isn’t just about simplifying interactions with Atlas it’s about reimagining the developer experience across multiple languages. Whether you’re a JavaScript junkie or a polyglot juggling Go, Java, and C#, the Atlas SDK aims to be an intuitive, powerful addition to your toolkit.

In this post, I’ll break down some of the core features of the Atlas SDK, share some hands-on experiences, and extend my exploration with examples in Go, Java, and C#. If you’ve ever wished that managing your clusters and configurations could be more straightforward and less “boilerplate heavy,” keep reading.

A Quick Recap: What the Atlas SDK Brings to the Table

At its heart, the MongoDB Atlas SDK abstracts the underlying Atlas API, making it easier to work with managed clusters, deployments, and security configurations. Here are a few standout features:

  • Intuitive API: The SDK feels natural, following patterns that resonate with MongoDB’s broader ecosystem. It’s almost always nice to just call into a set of SDK libraries vs. writing up an entire layer to call and manage the calls to an API tier itself.
  • Robust Functionality: It covers everything from cluster management to advanced security settings.
  • Modern Practices: Asynchronous and promise-based (or equivalent in your language of choice), the SDK fits snugly into today’s development paradigms.
  • Streamlined Setup: Detailed documentation and easy configuration mean you can spend more time coding and less time wrestling with setup.
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Software Development: Getting Started by Getting Organized

A few weeks ago I wrote up the post on the tech I’ve decided to move forward with for my new project. This post is going to cover the collection of features, domain details (i.e. what is the use case, etc), and related project collateral. Instead of just slinging code like many of us programmers often do, I’m going to layout what I’m trying to build, what features I want, and how I’m going to put those features together before delving into actual code. This way, my hope is I’ll be able to keep track over time better, and if any of this turns into something I’ll then have something to keep working from instead of throwing a code base over the fence to other devs. A crazy action that happens all the time, but is something worth avoiding!

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Starting a New Project – Let’s Choose a Tech Stack!

It’s time to start a new project. Because one can never have enough side projects! /s

This particular project I’ll be writing about in this post is derived from the multi-tenant music collector’s database I’ve already started working on. I’ve finally gotten back to it, during a slight break in collecting and music listening, to write up some of my thinking about this particular project.

Stated Objectives For This Application

  1. Personal Reasons: I always like to have side projects that I could make use of myself. Since I’ve recently started collecting music again, and in that am a new collector of vinyl albums, I wanted a better way to organize all that music and the extensive history, members, song, lyrics, and related information about the music and artists.
  2. For Everybody: Beyond the desire to have a well built application to provide the capabilities I’ve described above, I also want to provide this capability to others. In light of that capability, I’ll be designing this application as a multi-tenant application so that you too dear reader, once I get it built can use the application for your own music collection.
  3. Choose The Tech Stack: I’ll need to write this application in something, obviously, so this post is going to cover my reasoning for the tech stack I’m going to use. The application will be built in three core pieces: the database, the services and middle tier layer, and the user interface. I’ll detail each and cover the reasoning for the stack I’ll choose for each section.
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Speaking of Spring Boot Java Logging, Some Misadventures

Preface: I set out upon a task to incorporate some masking, redaction, or filtering of some sort on PII (Personally Identifying Information) for the log files and log data an application service is producing. The application pre-exists, so this isn’t entirely a green field situation, but the application generally fits a Spring Boot Service style application. The one key thing I wasn’t sure about when starting, was what kind of logging was already incorporated into the operational service.

Log Masking for Different Logging Libraries

The first solution I came up with was to incorporate a converter or appender of some sort that would mask PII with a string of some sort, like “****” or “—–“. This solution that I came up with, upon checking, looked like it would work out ok with or for a number of the top logging libraries for Java, specially libraries that run with or as a Spring Boot service like LogBack or Log4j.

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Building a Container Image w/ jib-maven Build Plugin

First I’ve setup a project, similar to the Hello World GraphQL API I setup here. I’ll setup another project that specifically uses Maven, to use the jib-maven plugin.

Setting Up the Project

I’ve used the standard Spring Initializr in Intellij.

  • Project: Maven Project
  • Language: Java
  • Spring Boot: Choose the latest stable version
  • Project Metadata: Fill in as per your requirement
  • Packaging: Jar
  • Java Version: Choose your Java version (e.g., 11)
  • Dependencies: Add ‘Spring Web’, ‘Spring Boot DevTools’, and ‘Spring for GraphQL’
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