Be precise, round twice

Recently after implementing a new feature in a software that outputs lots of floating point numbers, I realized that the last digits were off by one for about one in a hundred numbers. As you might suspect at this point, the culprit was floating point arithmetic. This post is about a solution, that turned out to surprisingly easy.

The code I was working on loads a couple of thousands numbers from a database, stores all the numbers as doubles, does some calculations with them and outputs some results rounded half-up to two decimal places. The new feature I had to implement involved adding constants to those numbers. For one value, 0.315, the constant in one of my test cases was 0.80. The original output was “0.32” and I expected to see “1.12” as the new rounded result, but what I saw instead was “1.11”.

What happened?

After the fact, nothing too surprising – I just hit decimals which do not have a finite representation as a binary floating point number. Let me explain, if you are not familiar with this phenomenon: 1/3 happens to be a fraction which does not have a finte representation as a decimal:

1/3=0.333333333333…

If a fraction has a finite representation or not, depends not only on the fraction, but also on the base of your numbersystem. And so it happens, that some innocent looking decimal like 0.8=4/5 has the following representation with base 2:

4/5=0.1100110011001100… (base 2)

So if you represent 4/5 as a double, it will turn out to be slightly less. In my example, both numbers, 0.315 and 0.8 do not have a finite binary representation and with those errors, their sum turns out to be slightly less than 1.115 which yields “1.11” after rounding. On a very rough count, in my case, this problem appeared for about one in a hundred numbers in the output.

What now?

The customer decided that the problem should be fixed, if it appears too often and it does not take to much time to fix it. When I started to think about some automated way to count the mistakes, I began to realize, that I actually have all the information I need to compute the correct output – I just had to round twice. Once say, at the fourth decimal place and a second time to the required second decimal place:

```(new BigDecimal(0.8d+0.315d))
.setScale(4, RoundingMode.HALF_UP)
.setScale(2, RoundingMode.HALF_UP)
```

Which produces the desired result “1.12”.

If doubles are used, the errors explained above can only make a difference of about $10^{-15}$, so as long as we just add a double to a number with a short decimal representation while staying in the same order of magnitude, we can reproduce the precise numbers from doubles by setting the scale (which amounts to rounding) of our double as a BigDecimal.

But of course, this can go wrong, if we use numbers, that do not have a short neat decimal representation like 0.315. In my case, I was lucky. First, I knew that all the input numbers have a precision of three decimal places. There are some calculations to be done with those numbers. But: All numbers are roughly in the same order of magnitude and there is only comparing, sorting, filtering and the only honest calculation is taking arithmetic means. And the latter only means I had to increase the scale from 4 to 8 to never see any error again.

So, this solution might look a bit sketchy, but in the end it solves the problem with the limited time budget, since the only change happens in the output function. And it can also be a valid first step of a migration to numbers with managed precision.

The Java Cache API and Custom Key Generators

The Java Cache API allows you to add a `@CacheResult` annotation to a method, which means that calls to the method will be cached:

```import javax.cache.annotation.CacheResult;

@CacheResult
public String exampleMethod(String a, int b) {
// ...
}
```

The cache will be looked up before the annotated method executes. If a value is found in the cache it is returned and the annotated method is never actually executed.

The cache lookup is based on the method parameters. By default a cache key is generated by a key generator that uses `Arrays.deepHashCode(Object[])` and `Arrays.deepEquals(Object[], Object[])` on the method parameters. The cache lookup based on this key is similar to a HashMap lookup.

You can define and configure multiple caches in your application and reference them by name via the `cacheName` parameter of the `@CacheResult` annotation:

```@CacheResult(cacheName="examplecache")
public String exampleMethod(String a, int b) {
```

If no cache name is given the cache name is based on the fully qualified method name and the types of its parameters, for example in this case: “my.app.Example.exampleMethod(java.lang.String,int)”. This way there will be no conflicts with other cached methods with the same set of parameters.

Custom Key Generators

But what if you actually want to use the same cache for multiple methods without conflicts? The solution is to define and use a custom cache key generator. In the following example both methods use the same cache (“examplecache”), but also use a custom cache key generator (`MethodSpecificKeyGenerator`):

```@CacheResult(
cacheName="examplecache",
cacheKeyGenerator=MethodSpecificKeyGenerator.class)
public String exampleMethodA(String a, int b) {
// ...
}

@CacheResult(
cacheName="examplecache",
cacheKeyGenerator=MethodSpecificKeyGenerator.class)
public String exampleMethodB(String a, int b) {
// ...
}
```

Now we have to implement the `MethodSpecificKeyGenerator`:

```import org.infinispan.jcache.annotation.DefaultCacheKey;

import javax.cache.annotation.CacheInvocationParameter;
import javax.cache.annotation.CacheKeyGenerator;
import javax.cache.annotation.CacheKeyInvocationContext;
import javax.cache.annotation.GeneratedCacheKey;

public class MethodSpecificKeyGenerator
implements CacheKeyGenerator {

@Override
public GeneratedCacheKey generateCacheKey(CacheKeyInvocationContext<? extends Annotation> context) {
Stream<Object> methodIdentity = Stream.of(context.getMethod());
Stream<Object> parameterValues = Arrays.stream(context.getKeyParameters()).map(CacheInvocationParameter::getValue);
return new DefaultCacheKey(Stream.concat(methodIdentity, parameterValues).toArray());
}
}
```

This key generator not only uses the parameter values of the method call but also the identity of the method to generate the key. The call to `context.getMethod()` returns a `java.lang.reflect.Method` instance for the called method, which has appropriate `hashCode()` and `equals()` implementations. Both this method object and the parameter values are passed to the DefaultCacheKey implementation, which uses deep equality on its parameters, as mentioned above.

By adding the method’s identity to the cache key we have ensured that there will be no conflicts with other methods when using the same cache.

24 hour time format: Difference between JodaTime and java.time

We have been using JodaTime in many projects since before Java got better date and time support with Java 8. We update projects to the newer `java.time` classes whenever we work on them, but some still use JodaTime. One of these was a utility that imports time series from CSV files. The format for the time stamps is flexible and the user can configure it with a format string like “yyyyMMdd HHmmss”. Recently a user tried to import time series with timestamps like this:

```20200101 234500
20200101 240000
20200102 001500
```

As you can see this is a 24-hour format. However, the first hour of the day is represented as the 24th hour of the previous day if the minutes and seconds are zero, and it is represented as “00” otherwise. When the user tried to import this with the “yyyyMMdd HHmmss” format the application failed with an internal exception:

```org.joda.time.IllegalFieldValueException:
Cannot parse "20200101 240000": Value 24 for
hourOfDay must be in the range [0,23]
```

Then he tried “yyyyMMdd kkmmss”, which uses the “kk” format for hours. This format allows the string “24” as hour. But now “20200101 240000” was parsed as 2020-01-01T00:00:00 and not as 2020-01-02T00:00:00, as intended.

I tried to help and find a format string that supported this mixed 24-hour format, but I did not find one, at least not for JodaTime. However, I found out that with `java.time` the import would work with the “yyyyMMdd HHmmss” format, even though the documentation for “H” simply says “hour-of-day (0-23)”, without mentioning 24.

The import tool was finally updated to `java.time` and the user was able to import the time series file.

Think of your code as a maintenance minefield

Most of the cost, effort and time of a software project is spent on the maintenance phase, the modification of a software product after delivery. If you think about all these resources as “negative investments” or debt settlement and try to associate your spendings with specific code areas or even single lines of code, you’ll probably find that the maintenance cost per line is not equally distributed. There are lots of lines of code that outlast the test of time without any maintenance work at all, a fair amount of lines that require moderate attention and some lines that seem to require constant and excessive developer care.

If you transfer this image to another metaphor, your code presents itself like a minefield for maintenance effort: Most of the area is harmless and safe to travel. But there are some positions that will just blow up once touched. The difference is that as a software developer, you don’t tread on the minefield, but you catch the flak if something happens.

You should try to deliver your code free of maintenance mines.

Spotting a maintenance mine

Identifying a line of code as a maintenance mine after the fact is easy. You probably already recognize the familiar code as “troublesome” because you’ve spent hours trying to understand and fix it. The commit history of your version control system can show you the “hottest” lines in your code – the areas that were modified most often. If you add tests for each new bug, you’ll find that the code is probably tested really well, with tests motivated by different bug issues. In hindsight, you can clearly distinguish low-effort code from high maintenance code.

But before delivery, all code looks the same. Or does it?

An example of a maintenance mine

Let’s look at an example. Our system monitors critical business data and sends out alerts if certain conditions are met. One implementation of the part sending the alerts is a simple e-mail sender. The code is given here:

```
public class SendEmailService {

public void sendTo(
Person person,
String subject,
String body) {
execCmd(
buildCmd(
person.email(), subject, body));
}

private String buildCmd(String recipientMailAdress, String subject, String body){
return "'/usr/bin/mutt -t " + recipientMailAdress + " -u " + subject + " -m " + body + "'";
}

private int execCmd(String command) throws IOException{
return Runtime.getRuntime()
.exec(command).exitValue();
}
}

```

This code has two interesting problems:

• The first problem is that it is written in Java, a platform agnostic programming language, but depends on being run on a linux (or sufficiently similar unixoid) operating system. The system it runs on needs to supply the /usr/bin/mutt program and have the e-mail sending settings properly configured or else every try to run the send command will result in an error. This implicit dependency on the configuration of the production system isn’t the best way to deal with the situation, but it’s probably a one-time pain. The problem clearly presents itself and once the system is set up in the right way, it is gone (until somebody tampers with the settings again). And my impression is that this code separates two concerns between development and operations rather nicely: Development provides software that can send specific e-mails if operations provides a system that is capable of sending e-mails. No need to configure the system for e-mail sending and doing it again for the software on said system.
• The second problem looks like a maintenance mine. In the line where the code passes the command line to the operating system (by calling Runtime.getRuntime().exec()), a Process object is returned that is only asked for its exitValue(), implicating a wait for the termination of the system command. The line looks straight and to the point. No need to store and handle intermediate objects if you aren’t interested in them. But perhaps, you should care:

By default, the created process does not have its own terminal or console. All its standard I/O (i.e. stdin, stdout, stderr) operations will be redirected to the parent process, where they can be accessed via the streams obtained using the methods `getOutputStream()`, `getInputStream()`, and `getErrorStream()`. The parent process uses these streams to feed input to and get output from the process. Because some native platforms only provide limited buffer size for standard input and output streams, failure to promptly write the input stream or read the output stream of the process may cause the process to block, or even deadlock.

This means that the Process object’s stdout and stderr outputs are stored in buffers of unknown (and system dependent) size. If one of these buffers fills up, the execution of the command just stops, as if somebody had paused it indefinitely. So, depending on your call’s talkativeness, your alert e-mail will not be sent, your system will appear to have failed to recognize the condition and you’ll never see a stacktrace or error exit value. All other e-mails (with less chatter) will go through just fine. This is a guaranteed source of frantic telephone calls, headaches and lost trust in your system and your ability to resolve issues.

And all the problems originate from one line of code. This is a maintenance mine with a stdout fuse.

The fix for this line might lie in the use of the ProcessBuilder class or your own utility code to drain the buffers. But how would you discover the mine before you deliver it?

Mines often lie at borders

One thing that stands out in this line of code is that it passes control to the “outside”. It acts as a transit point to the underlying operating system and therefor has a lot of baggage to check. There are no safety checks implemented, so the transit must be regarded as unsafe. If you look out for transit points in your code (like passing control to the file system, the network, a database or another external system), make sure you’ve read the instructions and requirements thoroughly. The problems of a maintenance mine aren’t apparent in your code and only manifest themselves during the interaction with the external system. And this is a situation that happens disproportionately often in production and comparably seldom during development.

So, think of your code as a maintenance minefield and be careful around its borders.

What is your minesweeper story? Drop us a comment.

Migrating from JScience quantities to Unit API 2.0

If you’re developing software that operates a lot with physical quantities you absolutely should use a library that defines types for quantities and supports safe conversions between units of measurements. Our go-to library for this in Java was JScience. The latest version of JScience is 4.3.1, which was released in 2012.

Since then a group of developers has formed that strives towards the standardization of a units API for Java. JScience maintainer Jean-Marie Dautelle is actively involved in this effort. The group operates under the name Units of Measurement alongside with their GitHub presence unitsofmeasurement.

Over the years there have been several JSRs (Java Specification Requests) by the group:

The current state of affairs is JSR-385, which is the basis of this post. The Units of Measurement API 2.0, or Unit API 2.0 for short, was released in July 2019.

JARs

While JScience is distributed as one JAR (~600 KiB), a setup of Unit API involves three JARs (~300 KiB in total):

• unit-api-2.0.jar
• indriya-2.0.jar
• uom-lib-common-2.0.jar

JScience offers a lot more functionality than just quantities and units, but that’s the part we have been using and what we are interested in.

The unit-api JAR only defines interfaces, which is the scope of JSR-385. So you need an implementation to do anything useful with it. The reference implementation is called Indriya, provided by the second JAR. The third JAR, uom-lib-common, is a utility library used by Indriya for common functionality shared with other projects under the Units of Measurement umbrella.

Using quantities

Here’s a simple use of a physical quantity with JScience, in this example Length:

```import org.jscience.physics.amount.Amount;

import javax.measure.quantity.Length;

import static javax.measure.unit.SI.*;

// ...

final Amount<Length> d = Amount.valueOf(214, CENTI(METRE));
final double d_metre = d.doubleValue(METRE);
```

And here’s the equivalent code using Units API 2.0 and Indriya:

```import tech.units.indriya.quantity.Quantities;

import javax.measure.Quantity;
import javax.measure.quantity.Length;

import static javax.measure.MetricPrefix.CENTI;
import static tech.units.indriya.unit.Units.METRE;

// ...

final Quantity<Length> d = Quantities.getQuantity(214, CENTI(METRE));
final double d_metre = d.to(METRE).getValue().doubleValue();
```

Consistency

While JScience also defines aliases with alternative spellings like METER and constants for many prefixed units like CENTIMETER or MILLIMETER, Indriya encourages consistency and only allows METRE, CENTI(METRE), MILLI(METRE).

Quantity names

Most quantities have the same names in both projects, but there are some differences:

• Amount<Duration> becomes Quantity<Time>
• Amount<Velocity> becomes Quantity<Speed>

In these cases Unit API uses the correct SI names, i.e. time and speed. Wikipedia explains the difference between speed and velocity.

Arithmetic operations

The method names for the elementary arithmetic operations have changed:

• minus() becomes subtract()
• times() becomes multiply()

Only the method name for division is the same:

• divide() is still divide()

However, the runtime exceptions thrown on division by zero are different:

• JScience: java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero
• Indriya: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: cannot initalize a rational number with divisor equal to ZERO

Type hints

If you divide or multiply two quantities the Java type system needs a type hint, because it doesn’t know the resulting quantity. Here’s how this looks in JScience versus Unit API:

With JScience:

```Amount<Area> a = Amount.valueOf(100, SQUARE_METRE);
Amount<Length> b = Amount.valueOf(10, METRE);
Amount<Length> c = a.divide(b)
.to(METRE);
```

With Unit API:

```Quantity<Area> a = Quantities.getQuantity(100, SQUARE_METRE);
Quantity<Length> b = Quantities.getQuantity(10, METRE);
Quantity<Length> c = a.divide(b)
.asType(Length.class);
```

Comparing quantities

If you want to compare quantities via compareTo(), isLessThan(), etc. you need quantities of type ComparableQuantity. The Quantities.getQuantity() factory method returns a ComparableQuantity, which is a sub-interface of Quantity.

Defining custom units

Defining custom units is very similar to JScience. Here’s an example for degree (angle), which is not an SI unit:

```public static final Unit<Angle> DEGREE_ANGLE =
MultiplyConverter.ofPiExponent(1).concatenate(MultiplyConverter.ofRational(1, 180)));
```

Lombok-Tooling surprise

Some months ago we took over development and maintenance of a Java EE-based web application. The project has ok-code for the most part and uses mostly standard libraries from the Java ecosystem. One of them is lombok which strives to reduce the boilerplate code needed and make the code more readable and concise.

Fortunately there is a plugin for IntelliJ, our favourite Java IDE that understands lombok and allows for easy navigation and code hints. For example you can jump from `getMyField()` to the lombok-annotated backing field of the getter and so on.

This sounds very good but some day we were debugging a weird behaviour. An abstract class contained a special implementation of a Map as its field and was annotated with `@Getter` and `@Setter`. But somehow the type and contents of the Map changed without calling the setter.

What was happening here? After a quite some time digging spent in the debugger we noticed, that the getter was overridden in a subclass. Normally, IntelliJ shows an Icon with navigation options beside overridden/overriding methods. Unfortunately for us not for lombok annotations!

Consider the following code:

```public class SuperClass {

@Getter
private List strings = new ArrayList();

public List getInts() {
return new ArrayList();
}
}

public class NotSoSuperClass extends SuperClass {
@Override
public List getStrings() {
return Arrays.asList("Many", "Strings");
}

@Override
public List getInts() {
return Arrays.asList(1,2,3);
}
}
```

The corresponding code in IntelliJ looks like this:

Notice that IntelliJ puts a nice little icon next to the line number where the class or a methods is subclassed/overridden. But not so for the lombok getter. This tiny detail lead to quite a surprise and cost us some hours.

Of course you can argue, that the code design is broken, but hey, that was the state and the tools are there to help you discover such weird quirks.

We opened an issue for the lombok IntelliJ plugin, so maybe it will be enhanced to provide such additional tooling information to be on par with plain old java code.

Java’s OptionalInt et al. versus Optional<T>

In Java 8 the Optional type was introduced to avoid the (ab)use of nullable types and null to indicate the absence of a value. It allows the programmer to clearly indicate whether the potential absence of a value is intentional or accidental.

Such option types, sometimes also called Maybe types, have been established in other programming languages, mostly in statically typed functional programming languages like ML and derivatives, but are also emerging in more mainstream languages like Swift.

Java’s Optional type is, to put it mildly, not the most sophisticated implementation of this concept, mostly due to limitations of Java’s existing type system. The Optional type is nullable itself, it’s not a sum type, so it has to rely on runtime exceptions to signal invalid access of a non-existent value, but it’s still useful. Static analysers, usually built into IDEs, can do what the compiler doesn’t and warn if the value is accessed without checking for its presence first.

The Optional type suffers from another limitation of Java’s type system: the fact that primitive types like int, long, double etc. and reference types, derived from Object, aren’t unified in a single type hierarchy. Related to that, primitive types can’t be used as generic type parameters in Java. The language works around this with additional boxed types like Integer, Long and Double for each primitive type.

When the stream API and the Optional type were introduced in Java 8, those primitive types were once again treated with special types: there’s not just Stream<T>, but also IntStream, LongStream, DoubleStream, there’s not just Optional<T>, but also OptionalInt, OptionalLong, OptionalDouble, the same for consumers, suppliers, predicates and functions.

This was done to avoid boxing and unboxing, but also makes it unpleasant to use. What’s worse is that the Optional variants for the primitive types don’t offer the same functionality as Optional<T>: they are lacking the filter, map and flatMap methods as well as the ofNullable factory method. All in all they are less useful than the real Optional, and there’s no convenient way to convert back and forth between, for example, an OptionalInt and Optional<Integer>.

The above mentioned annoyances are the reason why we prefer the generic variant over the special ones for the primitive types by default. Hopefully a future Java release will mitigate this dichotomy between those types, at least by adding the missing methods, but we are not aware of any plans for this yet.

Zero, Maybe, One and Many

In object-oriented programming languages like Java, the compiler will improve its helpfulness if the application provides a rich type system or strong domain model. There is a whole field of study for type systems, called type theory, that is fascinating and helpful, but does not provide easy rules to follow for beginning software developers. This blog entry proposes a simple set of rules for a specific part of type systems (associations among types) that can be applied to a domain model as a rule of thumb. The resulting model will empower the compiler and the code completion of the IDE to help the developer with writing correct code.

Data knows data

Even the most basic domain models separate the data in multiple entities (often classes). For example, an employee class has an internal id, but knows about a person class and a salary class that are associated with this employee. This “knowing about” is modeled as a reference to a person object and a salary object. In this case, the reference is probably of the type “one”: The employee object knows about one person object and one salary object. This is the usual way to structure data.

If you learn about the UML notation of data models, you’ll see that associations (aka references between objects) are given great emphasis. There are several different kinds of associations that can be customized by multiplicities and such. It seems that knowing other data is a complex issue for types. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are four ways of knowing other data that are sufficient for nearly every use case: Zero, Maybe, One and Many.

Four basic types of association

• Zero: Knowing zero elements of something different is the usual default case: Your employee object probably doesn’t need to know about the payroll object of the company and therefore has no association to it. This means that there is no member variable of the type Payroll in the class Employee. No developer ever modeled a “zero” association by declaring a member variable and setting it to null. This would be ridiculous. We just omit the member variable and are done. Knowing zero elements of something is easy.
• One: Yes, I’ve omitted Maybe at the moment. I’ll come back to it. Knowing one element of something is also not hard: You declare a member variable of the type, give it a good name (that’s the hard part!) and ensure that every instance of your class (every object) has a valid reference to an object of something’s type. If you call methods on this reference, you call methods on the object you know. As long as you live, the other object cannot disappear. Knowing one element of something is a long-lasting relationship.
• Maybe: Sometimes, you want to know an element of something that isn’t there yet or you knew an element of something once, but it is gone. You know “maybe one” element of something. These associations are typically programmed in a cumbersome way by many developers. Instead of embedding the “maybe” aspect in the type system and giving the compiler a chance to help, it is burdened solely onto the developer’s shoulders by implementing the “maybe” like a “one” with the added possibility of a null reference if the element isn’t there. A direct result of this approach are null-checks in the code or NullPointerExceptions at places without such checks. One possibility to elevate the “maybeness” into the type system is to implement the association with a Maybe or Optional type. Instead of referencing a Salary directly that might be null if an employee isn’t salaried anymore, the Employee class references an Optional<Salary> object. This object might “contain” a salary or it might not. With a few adjustments to the conditional flow of the code, this distinction between “something is there” and “something is not there” doesn’t matter anymore. If the code is free from implicit Optional types (references that can be null), a whole category of bugs disappears and the code is freed from manually programmed type system checks. Probably knowing one element is the type of assocation that requires some thought and is often done on the wrong level.
• Many: As soon as you want to know more than one element of something, you fall into the “many” category. Many-associations are not so easy to handle, because there are so many possibilities to express them. The basic types are arrays or lists. My recommendation is to use lists whenever feasible and only resort to arrays if it is necessary, because arrays are fixed-length and have the same problem of maybe-null-references: An array index might have been written yet or not. If you refrain from storing null references into lists, they express their filling level a lot clearer than arrays. And given advanced features like iterators, there isn’t even a need to ask for the filling level. An interesting observation is that the list-based many-association can also serve as a zero-, maybe- or one-association. It is possible to replace all other types of association with lists. You probably won’t want to do this, because with the maximization of multiplicity flexibility comes more complexity and reduced readability of the code. You should strive to minimize complexity. Only add many-associations if you really need them. Even just replacing a “maybe” (Optional) with a “many” (List) is a source of much unwanted code and uncertainty.

Of course, there are many more types of association that you’ll eventually need. A good example is the qualified association, often implemented by a Map/Dictionary that translates from the qualifier type to the qualified type. But they are rare in comparison to the four basic types.

Summary

If you get your basic associations right, your domain model will help your compiler and IDE to support and guide you. This is an upfront investment that pays off manyfold over the course of the project and eliminates the burden of attention to detail when it comes to accidental complexity like null pointers. Your project’s domain probably doesn’t contain null pointers, but the concepts of knowing zero, maybe, one and many.

Cache configuration with WildFly, Infinispan, CDI and JCache

This post is about a specific problem I encountered using the WildFly application server in combination with the Infinispan cache module, CDI and the JCache API. If you don’t use this combination of technologies this post is probably not relevant or interesting to you, but I hope it will help someone who encounters the same problem.

The problem

After upgrading an application from WildFly 10 to WildFly 13 it became apparent that the settings for the Infinispan caches from the WildFly configuration file are no longer applied to the caches used by the application.

The cache settings in the WildFly configuration specify a cache container, several local caches and the object memory sizes and expiration lifespans of these caches:

```<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:infinispan:6.0">
<cache-container name="myapp" default-cache="default" module="org.wildfly.clustering.web.infinispan" statistics-enabled="true">
<local-cache name="default" statistics-enabled="true">
<object-memory size="10000"/>
<expiration lifespan="86400000"/>
</local-cache>
<local-cache name="foo" statistics-enabled="true">
<object-memory size="10000"/>
<expiration lifespan="600000"/>
</local-cache>
</cache-container>
</subsystem>
```

The cache manager is injected via CDI resource injection in a `Config` class as the default cache manager:

```class Config {
@Produces
@Resource(lookup = "java:jboss/infinispan/container/myapp")
private EmbeddedCacheManager defaultCacheManager;
}
```

The caches are used via the `@CacheResult` annotation from the JCache API (JSR-107):

```class FooService {
@CacheResult(cacheName = "foo")
public List<Foo> getFoo(String query) {
// ...
}
}
```

With this setup the application worked, the service results were cached, but the cache settings from the configuration file were not applied, as could be seen by inspecting the MBeans of the caches via JConsole. Instead the caches used a default configuration with an expiration lifespan of -1 (never), even though they were assigned to the cache container “myapp” as configured.

The solution

One particular answer to a similar problem description on StackOverflow was helpful in finding the solution. Each cache must be injected once via CDI resource lookup as well:

```import org.infinispan.Cache;

class Config {
@Resource(lookup = "java:jboss/infinispan/cache/myapp/foo")
private Cache<String, Object> fooCache;

// ...
}
```

The format of the JNDI path is:

`"java:jboss/infinispan/cache/\${cacheContainerName}/\${cacheName}"`

The property itself will be unused, but the `@CacheResult` annotation will now use the cache with the correct configuration.

Did Java just flip the switch?

Twenty years ago, a groundbreaking book was published: Refactoring by Martin Fowler. In this book, we learnt about 72 ways to improve our code and, even more important, over 20 unique signs of bad code, so-called code smells. Among these code smells were obvious ones like “Duplicated Code” and “Long Parameter List” and more specific ones like “Temporary Field” and “Switch Statements”.

Switch is the main offender

What is wrong with a Switch Statement, you ask? Well, nearly everything. Let’s review three flaws of a classic switch statement in Java on different levels:

• Syntax: The syntax of a switch is clunky at best. Whoever thought that “fall-through” should be the default behaviour and subsequently forced millions of developers to “break” their cases is responsible for so much unnecessary extra work. Think about how a “fallthrough” statement instead of a “break” could have changed the world.
• Code Design: Each switch statement is an inherent complexity hog. At least if you measure classic complexity metrics like McCabe or cyclomatic complexity. Anything but the smallest switches results in complexity counts that are through the roof. And a small switch is just a syntactically bloated if/else.
• Programming Paradigm: The reason Martin Fowler advocated against using switch statements is because the alternative, using polymorphism to implicitly switch over the object type, wasn’t common knowledge 20 years ago. Switch statements were the cornerstones of explicit conditional logic and were prone to repetition, leading to duplicated code – another code smell.

There are more things wrong with a classic switch statement, but the logic is clear: Take away the culmilations of explicit conditional logic and developers will adjust their approach and adopt more diverse paradigms. If you think this through, you can also argue that taking away the “else” keyword (as the Object Calisthenics do) or even the “if” statement (as advocated by the anti-if campaign) leads to even more diversity and progressive programming.

Switch in rehabilitation?

For me, a switch statement was nearly always the wrong choice for a given problem. And experienced thinkers like Martin Fowler backed my opinion, so I couldn’t be wrong – right?

In the second edition of Refactoring, published early this year, Martin Fowler changes his position towards the Switch Statement considerably. A single switch isn’t the gateway drug to imperative programming anymore. You’ll need to have “Repeated Switches” to count as a code smell. You can still use “Replace Conditional with Polymorphism”, but the enthusiasm about implicit condititonal structures like polymorphism has faded. Martin Fowler writes that today, we all know about the different ways to express conditional logic. I’m not so sure. He also writes that many languages support more sophisticated forms of switch statements. Ok, but what about the mainstream languages like Java?

My biggest problem with the classic switch statement was that it was a “single purpose” structure. It could only be used to jump to a limited number of code addresses based on a limited type of criterium. I prefer code structures that are “dual purpose” or even “multi-purpose”. When Java’s switch statement got upgraded to switch over Enums (Java 5) and Strings (Java 7), it got more powerful, but still only supported one use case: explicit branching over a condition.

Switch with dual use

In the upcoming Java 12 (yes, we’ve come a long way in terms of version numbers since Java 8), the “Java Enhancement Process” JEP 325 will be included: Switch Expressions. It is marked as a preview language feature, meaning it is ready for usage, but open for discussion – and you’ll have to enable it explicitly. In the grand scheme of things for Java, it is a stepping stone for JEP 305: Pattern Matching for instanceof that will also change the switch statement even further.

With Switch Expressions, you can use a switch statement to essentially inline a method that uses lots of explicit conditionals to map one value to another:

```int numLetters = switch (day) {
case MONDAY, FRIDAY, SUNDAY -> 6;
case TUESDAY                -> 7;
case THURSDAY, SATURDAY     -> 8;
case WEDNESDAY              -> 9;
};
```

Your switch can now return a result. And with that improvement, it isn’t single purposed anymore. This is the moment when a switch statement isn’t the most clunky and error-prone way to solve a problem anymore, but maybe even elegant and straight to the point.

This is the moment I definitely change my opinion about the switch statement (in Java) and welcome it back into my solution toolbox. How could such an ugly duckling become such a beautiful swan? And why did this take us twenty years?

You can read more about the new switch statement in this brilliant blog post from Nicolai Parlog.

Anyways, the “else” keyword is now even more obsolete than ever.