Cinq

That took a bit more work than usual.

There was a few missing components and it I did not find a single source to know how to address the issue.

I had a hard time installing the virtualbox guest addition in Fedora 23. I kept getting errors about missing kernel headers, missing gcc and the fact that the x.org was experimental so it could not complete the installation.

The first few issues were easy to address:

sudo dnf install kernel-headers

The only catch was that my installation was with Kernel 4.2.3 but since the update channel had 4.2.8 headers available the latest got installed which did not match the kernel version I was running.

Lesson learned: update everything before installing new packages

The second component to add was the gcc:

sudo dnf install gcc

If you are up to date there is no issue to worry about otherwise you may get a mix of versions for the dependencies that will not work.

The last issue had the solution in the /var/log/vbox-install.log.

cd /usr/src/kernels/4.2.8-300.fc23.x86_64

sudo make oldconfig

After that I ran the vbox guest addition installation and it completed without error. A restart and everything was working between the guest OS and the hosting one.

I just did a rookie mistake that costed me a few hours.

If you want Spring to be able to create an object from the json you are sending to a controller you need to make sure that you are not creating a constructor with parameters without a default constructor.

I simply removed my constructor since it was not used and everything started to work as expected.

The 400 Bad Request stopped puzzling me.

The POJO is simple:

package com.cinq.example.v1;

public class Request {

 private String version;
 private String template;
 private int lifespan;

 public int getLifespan() {
 return lifespan;
 }

 public String getVersion() {
 return version;
 }

 public String getTemplate(){
 return template;
 }

 public void setVersion(final String version){
 this.version = version;
 }

 public void setTemplate(final String template){
 this.template = template;
 }

 public void setLifespan(final int lifespan){
 this.lifespan = lifespan;
 }
}

The controller that takes the json to create the object is also very simple:

package com.cinq.example.v1;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestBody;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;

/**
 * API for something
 */
@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/api/v1")
public class Management {

	private final static Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Management.class);

	@RequestMapping(value = "/something", consumes = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, method = RequestMethod.POST)
	@ResponseBody
	public Response creation(@RequestBody final Request request){
		LOGGER.info("Will create something with " + request.getVersion());
		try {
			Thread.sleep(5000);
		} catch ( final InterruptedException exception ) {
			LOGGER.error("Could not sleep for 5 secs.");
		}

		return(new Response("test001", "s1", "sp1", "u1", "up1", 100L));
	}
}

The Response object is as simple as the Request one and has many String fields.

Lesson Learned

If you need to create a constructor make sure you have the default one defined as well.

Servlet 3.1 allows to have web apps with no web.xml but Maven was giving me errors when trying to package the application.

I had to add this to my pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.6</version>
  <configuration>
    <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

I decided to create a Design Patterns page to keep notes on all the articles out there since a few have disappointed me with the inaccuracies that they contain. I want to avoid making some of these mistakes and will try to list and create code examples that are correct.

Design Patterns