I'm proud to share the keynote stage with Jake at Droidcon Montréal this April. We're planning to talk about open source. That’s a broad topic, and one I’ve presented on previously.

But it isn’t just about bug reports and pull requests. I’m thinking a lot about what Ashe Dryden said in The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community:

“OSS contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time.

Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.”

Yikes. I’ve been doing open source for a decade, but only because I’ve had the privilege of time & resources to do so.

It’ll be an interesting conversation, and it’s happening at Droidcon Montréal April 9–10. Early bird registration ends January 31!

Exceptions are powerful control flow: mainline code handles the mainline cases, and exception cases can be handled elsewhere. But sometimes you want to observe whether an exception occurred, without necessarily handling that exception.

For example, suppose we're writing a service that sends webhooks to a far-away webserver. Webhooks are naturally flaky: there are usually many target servers, each managed a different team with a different expectation of availability and correctness.

Our method wants to run webhooks and keep statistics on their results:

public int sendWebhook(String url, String request)  
    throws IOException {
  try {
    int statusCode = httpPost(url, request);
    if (statusCode >= 400) {
      failureCount++;
    }
    return statusCode;
  } catch (IOException e) {
    errorCount++;
    throw e;
  }
}

What happens if httpPost() throws an unchecked exception, like WebServiceException? Well, we can handle that too. And also Error so that assertion failures aren't dropped:

public int sendWebhook(String url, String request)  
    throws IOException {
  try {
    int statusCode = httpPost(url, request);
    if (statusCode >= 400) {
      failureCount++;
    }
    return statusCode;
  } catch (IOException | RuntimeException | Error e) {
    errorCount++;
    throw e;
  }
}

This works. But it's unfortunate to list the three different Throwable types that can pass-through this method, especially if those types could change. Should we add another checked exception like URISyntaxException, it's easy to lose

I was running a jstack dump on my project's app server this afternoon & I saw Okio Watchdog among the threads:

"Okio Watchdog" #1972 daemon prio=5 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f4a8c01e800 nid=0x362 in Object.wait() [0x00007f48f2351000]  
   java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor)
    at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
    at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:502)
    at okio.AsyncTimeout.awaitTimeout(AsyncTimeout.java:297)
    - locked <0x0000000733eaa0e0> (a java.lang.Class for okio.AsyncTimeout)
    at okio.AsyncTimeout.access$000(AsyncTimeout.java:40)
    at okio.AsyncTimeout$Watchdog.run(AsyncTimeout.java:272)

This is a thread Okio uses to implement fancy timeouts for OkHttp.

The JDK's Network Timeouts

There are two timeout mechanisms in Java's networking stacks:

• Socket.connect() and Socket.setSoTimeout implement connect and read timeouts respectively. They work with blocking I/O.
• Selector.select() implements connect, read and write timeouts for non-blocking I/O.

Notably, there's no API for write timeouts on blocking I/O. Oracle advises you switch to NIO if you need that.

Okio Timeouts

Okio uses a watchdog thread to implement read & write timeouts for blocking I/O. When the watchdog sees that an operation has gone on too long

GitHub's wiki permits embedded images, but offers no UI to upload your own images. Here's how to do it from the command line.

Clone the Wiki's Git Repo

GitHub's wiki is itself a git repository. Clone it to your desktop using an SSH URL to make git push just work later. (This assumes you're already configured SSH keys with GitHub).

Here I'm editing the wiki for square/okhttp. Substitute square with your GitHub username or organization, and okhttp with your GitHub project.

git clone git@github.com:square/okhttp.wiki.git  
cd okhttp.wiki/  

Add the image

There's no pull requests or other process here. Just push master once you've added the image.

mv ~/Desktop/interceptors@2x.png ./  
git add interceptors@2x.png  
git commit -m "Add interceptors diagram."  
git push  

Embed the image

Raw wiki resources are web-accessible at raw.githubusercontent.com. The URL for my image is here and the corresponding markdown is this:

 ![Interceptors Diagram](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/square/okhttp/interceptors@2x.png)

I edited my wiki on the web; editing it in the local git repository also works. Just don't forget to push.

Enjoy

When Josh Bloch measures an API, he evaluates its power to weight ratio: great APIs let you accomplish a lot (high power) without much mechanism (lightweight).

Interceptors are a new feature of OkHttp 2.2. There isn't much mechanism: two interfaces and four methods:

public interface Interceptor {  
  Response intercept(Chain chain) throws IOException;

  interface Chain {
    Request request();
    Response proceed(Request request) throws IOException;
    Connection connection();
  }
}

Use OkHttp's interceptors to hook into your application's HTTP calls. You get to see everything that's coming in and going out to the application (that's an application interceptor). Plus what goes out to and back in from the network (that's a network interceptor).

There is a dangerous amount of power here. Like magic, incredible cosmic power can accomplish great things when it is used carefully:

• You can throttle incoming and outgoing bandwidth.
• You can rewrite requests to compress them or sign them.
• You can collect profiling data.
• You can validate responses.
• You can transform the response to workaround server problems.

And like magic, you can get yourself into trouble. Be careful! Read the interceptors doc and code examples to learn how it all works before you dive in.

Get it

The changelog has full details

Étienne Vallette d'Osia tweeted about a surprising behavior lurking in SimpleDateFormat:

If you use SimpleDateFormat and “YYYY” for years (not “yyyy”), your code currently returns 2015 instead of 2014. Enjoy! (no pb w/ jodatime)

He's right.

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-YYYY");

Calendar day1 = new GregorianCalendar(2014, Calendar.DECEMBER, 28);  
System.out.println(format.format(day1.getTime()));

Calendar day2 = new GregorianCalendar(2014, Calendar.DECEMBER, 29);  
System.out.println(format.format(day2.getTime()));  

That code prints:

27-Dec-2014  
28-Dec-2015  

Looks like Twitter for Android probably suffered this bug, and signed out all of its Android users.

This is working as intended! From the SimpleDateFormat docs:

Week Of Year and Week Year

Values calculated for the WEEK_OF_YEAR field range from 1 to 53. The first week of a calendar year is the earliest seven day period starting on getFirstDayOfWeek() that contains at least getMinimalDaysInFirstWeek() days from that year.

…

For example, January 1, 1998 is a Thursday. If getFirstDayOfWeek() is MONDAY and getMinimalDaysInFirstWeek() is 4 (ISO 8601 standard compatible setting), then week 1 of 1998 starts on December 29, 1997, and ends on January 4, 1998.

Yikes.

Tonight I was looking around the web for examples of Content-MD5 in an HTTP response. I was thinking it'd make for another example of OkHttp's powerful new Interceptor API.

I haven't found such an example yet. But I did stumble upon some curious headers on Apple's CDN:

~ curl -v http://images.apple.com/ac/globalheader/1.0/styles/globalheader.css
> GET /ac/globalheader/1.0/styles/globalheader.css HTTP/1.1
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
< ntCoent-Length: 89953  
< Transfer-Encoding:  chunked  
...

I'm guessing ntCoent-Length is an (obvious) misspelling of Content-Length. Weird. Typos happen.

But what's weirder still is that another file on the same host has a similar typo:

~ curl -v http://images.apple.com/metrics/ac-analytics/0.2/scripts/ac-analytics.js
> GET /metrics/ac-analytics/0.2/scripts/ac-analytics.js HTTP/1.1
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
< nnCoection: close  
< Connection: keep-alive  
...

You say nnCoection, I say Connection. Now I have a puzzle: what would trigger a bug like this?

Public APIs

I work on lots of public APIs. For those, it's nice to have nicely-formatted Javadoc, following the Guava guidelines. This means lots of <p> tags, {@code} blocks! Here's an example from Okio:

  /**
   * Wait at most {@code timeout} time before aborting
   * an operation. Using a per-operation timeout means
   * that as long as forward progress is being made, no
   * sequence of operations will fail.
   *
   * <p>If {@code timeout == 0}, operations will run
   * indefinitely. (Operating system timeouts may still
   * apply.)
   */
  public Timeout timeout(long timeout, TimeUnit unit) {
    ...
  }

Private Implementations

I also work on a large, not-open-source Java project: the Square Cash service. This project is developed by a team, and quite frequently I've been harassing my team to fix their darn Javadoc tags. Typically it's a missing <p> tag. Here's an offending example from our payment history query:

  /**
   * Returns payments for `customerId` in the named role
   * with the current client. We query senders and recipients
   * independently and merge the results in memory because
   * MySQL uses its indices this way and doesn't otherwise.
   *
   * This returns one more results than `maxResults` so the
   * caller can tell if another page should be offered.
   */
  List<PaymentRow> paymentsInRole

Much of the Dagger vs. Guice comparison is about code generation vs. reflection. But they're also different in how they ask you to structure your application...

Guice

Guice apps are built with these fundamental abstractions:

• Multiple injection points: dependencies, being injected.
• Multiple bindings: dependencies, being provided.
• Multiple modules: a collection of bindings that implement a feature.
• One injector: a collection of modules that implement an application.

And then there's Guice scopes:

• Unscoped: a new instance for each injection. Unscoped objects have the same lifetime of whatever injects them. Business logic classes like an SmsMessageValidator should be unscoped.
• Custom-scoped: your business logic controls how injected instances are shared. For example, @RequestScoped gives you a place to share the state of an HTTP request. Context-dependent classes like a UserAuthenticator should be custom-scoped.
• Singleton-scoped: one instance for the entire application. Shared resources like a DatabaseConnectionPool should be singleton-scoped.

Dagger 1

Dagger 1.x's fundamentals are similar:

• Multiple injection points: same.
• Multiple bindings: same.
• Multiple modules: same.
• Multiple object graphs: a collection of modules that implement a scope.

Dagger doesn't have custom scopes. Instead, we layer multiple object graphs.

• One root object graph contains all of the application-wide stuff. Like the DatabaseConnectionPool.
• Multiple custom

OkHttp 2.1 is out. The release candidate announcement explains that 2.1 is focused on caching & crypto.

The release has new APIs to customize TLS, giving you control of certificate pinning, cipher suites, and TLS versions. For example, now you can restrict an OkHttpClient to cipher suites that support perfect forward secrecy:

ConnectionSpec spec = new ConnectionSpec.Builder(ConnectionSpec.MODERN_TLS)  
    .tlsVersions(TlsVersion.TLS_1_2)
    .cipherSuites(
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256,
        CipherSuite.TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
        CipherSuite.TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA)
    .build();
client.setConnectionSpecs(Collections.singletonList(spec));  

(Note that perfect forward secrecy is already available by default and will be used where it can be negotiated. This

We've just cut the first release candidate of OkHttp 2.1. This release is focused on caching & crypto.

Caching

We've improved cache APIs and also fixed some long-lived cache bugs. If you're using OkHttp with Picasso, it may fix some unexpected cache misses. The cache is now private which allows it to store resources guarded with OAuth Authorization headers.

Getting the right Cache-Control is now easier, with constants for FORCE_CACHE and FORCE_NETWORK for the rare occasions when you need to override the default policy:

    Request request = new Request.Builder()
        .cacheControl(CacheControl.FORCE_NETWORK)
        .url("https://square.com/cash")
        .build();

Crypto

We've become quite opinionated on TLS configuration. We now expose a class, ConnectionSpec to manipulate which TLS versions are enabled (for example, to mitigate SSLv3's POODLE vulnerability) and also which cipher suites (for perfect forward secrecy). You can now disable TLS fallback and cleartext connections.

This release introduces an API for certificate pinning, though you should use it very carefully.

client.setCertificatePinner(new CertificatePinner.Builder()  
    .add("publicobject.com", "sha1/DmxUShsZuNiqPQsX2Oi9uv2sCnw=")
    .add("publicobject.com", "sha1/SXxoaOSEzPC6BgGmxAt/EAcsajw=")
    .add("publicobject.com", "sha1/blhOM3W9V/bVQhsWAcLYwPU6n24=")
    .add("publicobject.com", "sha1/T5x9IXmcrQ7YuQxXnxoCmeeQ84c=")
    .build());

Get it now

The changelog has full details of

My hobby app Rounds was 99¢ for its first 2 years. In September, I made a bunch of changes. I made the app free and instead offered a 99¢ in-app purchase to unlock a full palette of colors.

■ Blue is sales.
■ Red is current installs.

Note that current installs were depressingly small & flat for a very long time. As a small number new users purchased and installed the app, an equally small number of old users uninstalled and moved on.

Going free yielded a nice spike in installs, but no equivalent bump in sales. Ratings are also down from 4.8 stars to 4.5, mostly due to a handful of drive-by one-star reviews.

Clearly I need to figure out how to improve conversion.

Pierre-Yves Ricau:

“The backstack isn't an activity specific notion; you can implement a backstack within an activity.”

Great advice. Fragments are too complicated to be worthwhile for simple apps. But they're also too complicated to be productive in sophisticated apps. You don't need 'em.

Nolan Lawson:

“If you design your UIs for people who are disconnected or only infrequently connected, you create better interfaces for everyone, including those who are online with fast connections.”

Brilliant post.

Dagger has always been a collaboration between Google and Square. Both companies are heavily invested in Guice (and Bob!), and eager to see our code become faster & easier to use.

Dagger 1.0 was born in Square Register for Android. We’d been using a lot of Guice, and had run into performance problems. Our goal was to build something that does fewer things and runs faster.

It worked. We built a simple runtime that worked with either reflection (for interactive development) and code-gen (for deployment).

Dagger 2 is being developed at Google. They're working in bigger code bases (web services!) and want something faster, particularly for graph building. So they've built something that does even fewer things and runs even faster.

Googlers Gregory Kick and Christian Gruber have done a fantastic job. The Dagger 2 generated code is so simple! For the full rundown, see Greg's talk, Dagger 2, A New Type of Dependency Injection. My favorite part is the auto principal for generating code:

1. Constrain the problem.
2. Generate the only reasonable implementation.

I'm eager for Dagger 2. Stab me plenty.

KitKat + dalvikvm:

 java.lang.NullPointerException
  at com.roundsapp.HomeActivity.onCreate(HomeActivity.java:61)
  at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:5312)

Android L + ART:

java.lang.NullPointerException: Attempt to invoke virtual method 'void android.app.ActionBar.setTitle(java.lang.CharSequence)' on a null object reference  
  at com.roundsapp.HomeActivity.onCreate(HomeActivity.java:61)
  at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:5720)
  ...

I expect this to be extremely handy for those lines of code that involve chain several calls.

Why doesn't desktop Java have this?

When Gson binding fails, it gives you a crappy exception that tells you where in the document things went sideways:

com.google.gson.JsonSyntaxException: Expected a boolean but was NUMBER at line 1 column 4728  
    at com.google.gson.stream.JsonReader.nextBoolean()
    at com.google.gson.TypeAdapters$3.read()
    at com.google.gson.TypeAdapters$3.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$1.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$1.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    ...

With Gson 2.3, you get a much nicer exception. It tells you the JSONPath to the failure. In this case, $.history[0].change_status.deletions:

com.google.gson.JsonSyntaxException: Expected a boolean but was NUMBER at line 1 column 4728 path $.history[0].change_status.deletions  
    at com.google.gson.stream.JsonReader.nextBoolean()
    at com.google.gson.TypeAdapters$3.read()
    at com.google.gson.TypeAdapters$3.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$1.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$1.read()
    at com.google.gson.ReflectiveTypeAdapter$Adapter.read()
    ...

Get Gson 2.3 from the

Brent Simmons:

Here’s my secret, or maybe my superpower, or maybe just me being lucky — I’ve never had a bug related to using a string literal when I should have used a constant.

But I have had bugs when I used the wrong string constant.

I'm the same.

Holo's color palette is opinionated, but limited. Five hues each in a primary and darker shade for a total of ten colors. (There's swatches for lighter tints, but these are rarely used.)

Material Design's color palette is the opposite: 19 hues, 16 of which have accent variants. With all tints including white and black, the palette is a neat 256 colors. With so many colors, Material Design is not a uniform, but a system. You might have six blue apps, with each one in a different shade of blue. The apps that use the system will be vibrant and colorful.

Both of my own apps (Shush & Rounds) use Holo's palette for a native look on Android 4.0. I didn't worry about colors: I just let the platform pick for me. Even Rounds’ icon uses the five Holo colors.

With Material Design in Android 5.0 (“The L Release”), I'm back in the driver’s seat. I'm okay with that. Though it might mean I'll need to redraw Rounds’ icon!

Ned Batchelder:

Paying more attention to the comments will help you write better code. I can't tell you how many times I've written what I thought was a perfecty good function or line of code, then gone to write the comment or docstring, and realized a better way to do it, or even just a better name.

We follow this practice at Square and I'm very happy with it. Plus, if somebody forgets punctuation we get to joke, “You missed your period!” which is fun and silly.

Today Google released a revised Roboto. Their design site says,

It is slightly wider and rounder, giving it greater clarity and making it more optimistic.

In Blue, Roboto from Android 4.4 (download .zip)
In Red, Roboto from “The L Release” (download .zip)

To my eyes they're quite a bit different. The new Roboto dots its i's and exclamation marks with circles; the old one with squares.

On the Android Developers blog, Wouter van Oortmerssen writes:

Game developers, we've just released FlatBuffers, a C++ serialization library that allows you to read data without unpacking or allocating additional memory, as an open source project. [...] Use this library to store game data with less overhead than alternative solutions (e.g. Protocol Buffers or JSON).

The Java generated for FlatBuffers is ugly. For example, use the schema language to define an enum with flat buffers:

enum Color:byte { Red = 0, Green, Blue = 2 }  

That yields generated Java that isn't an enum!

public class Color {  
  public static final byte Red = 0;
  public static final byte Green = 1;
  public static final byte Blue = 2;
};

Worse, the format is not memory-safe. On Hacker News, Wouter writes:

Most readers of binary file formats can be made to read memory outside the buffer by corrupting the data, and FlatBuffers is no different.

That said, an option to bounds-check every offset would be possible, at a certain cost. Might be a nice optional feature to have.

Skipping bounds checks is what caused the Heartbleed bug. It's possible the Google servers using FlatBuffers may suffer the same problem!

FlatBuffers isn't ready. I'm going to stick with JSON

Last year, during Square's 7 days of open source, we announced Mime Craft, which makes it easy to build browser-style HTTP request bodies.

With this week's OkHttp 2 release candidate, we've promoted that MimeCraft code into OkHttp itself. You can encode a form request:

RequestBody formBody = new FormEncodingBuilder()  
  .add("search", "Jurassic Park")
  .build();
Request request = new Request.Builder()  
  .url("https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php")
  .post(formBody)
  .build();

Response response = client.newCall(request).execute();  

Or a multipart request:

RequestBody requestBody = new MultipartBuilder()  
  .type(MultipartBuilder.FORM)
  .addPart(
    Headers.of("Content-Disposition", "form-data; name=title"),
    RequestBody.create(null, "Logo"))
  .addPart(
    Headers.of("Content-Disposition", "form-data; name=image"),
    RequestBody.create(MEDIA_TYPE_PNG, new File("logo.png")))
  .build();

Request request = new Request.Builder()  
  .header("Authorization", "Client-ID " + IMGUR_CLIENT_ID)
  .url("https://api.imgur.com/3/image")
  .post(requestBody)
  .build();

Response response = client.newCall(request).execute();  

It's quite satisfying to build a multipart RequestBody from other RequestBody values. Yo dawg.

Complete examples are on the OkHttp recipes page.

I was planning two TLS code samples for OkHttp's recipes page. One to make development easier by disabling certificate checks and another to make deployment more secure by pinning TLS certificates.

Disabling Certificate Checks

It's a hassle to get TLS going on a local development server. Disabling certificate checking is unfortunate, but productive. The most important part about disabling security in development is remembering to re-enable it for production! And to test that yes, it really is secure in production.

Pinning Certificates

Disabling certificate checks trades generally-unnecessary security for developer productivity. Pinning certificates is the opposite: spend more time setting it up, and get even more security.

The extra security you gain is defense against rogue certificate authorities. For example, in 2011 DigiNotar signed fraudulent certificates for google.com, leaving web users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

I wrote up a fun little program that captures the server's SSL certificate and generates copy-and-pasteable code with your pinned certificate:

  /**
   * Pinned certificate chain for google.com.
   * Expires Tue Aug 19 20:00:00 EDT 2014.
   */
  public static final SSLContext SSL_CONTEXT_GOOGLE_COM_EXPIRES_20140819 
      = new SslContextBuilder()
      // CN=*.google.com, O=Google Inc, L=Mountain View, ST=California
      .addCertificate(""
          + "M2DNSYlXEjlHxLfN23DIk7xnThH4RTk4bhhtWtBTyR9G5aOCBBkwgg"
          + "MIIGgTCCBWmgAwIBAgIIoSeucwDQYJKoZIhvcNAwSTELMAkGA1UEBh"
          + ...
          + "FdDynG494MhWpmLdY5xzOWqb7+xmPdo3947O2Mg

OkHttp has a bunch of docs:

• Marketing Site: what it is, basic examples, and download links.
• Design Overviews: high-level explanation on how things fit together.
• Recipes: executable sample code.
• Javadoc: reference docs.

The recipes are new. The contrast between recipes and Javadocs is interesting:

Javadocs show you how to call a method: what parameters are legal and what return values to expect.

And the recipe shows you why.

Adrian, Jake and I have been working on OkHttp 2.0 quite actively for nearly a year, and we're finally ready to share its new API with the world:

OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient();  
Request request = new Request.Builder()  
    .url("https://square.com/")
    .build();
Response response = client.newCall(request).execute();  
System.out.println(response.body().string());  

The 2.0 API leverages fluent builders and immutability to make HTTP easy. It can be used synchronously (above) or asynchronously:

OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient();  
Request request = new Request.Builder()  
    .url("https://square.com")
    .build();
client.newCall(request).enqueue(new Callback() {  
  @Override public void onResponse(Response response)
      throws IOException {
    System.out.println(response.body().string());
  }

  @Override public void onFailure(Request r, Throwable e) {
    ...
  }
});

It shares the same sophisticated backend as our HttpURLConnection API which moved to a new okhttp-urlconnection artifact.

OkHttp 2.0 is not backwards-compatible. The changelog describes what's changed and what's gone. To make upgrading easier, we're also releasing OkHttp 1.6 which is the 1.5 code plus some new 2.0 APIs. Use 1.6 to transition to 2.x APIs.

Today we're publishing a release-candidate with the goal of a final release in June. Between now and then we're going

Claiming “We’re the fastest!” is a great way to grow a project’s popularity, particularly for mechanical tasks like JSON parsing. This month there's been plenty of comparison between Jackson and Boon.

Boon author Rick Hightower:

“Boon JSON parser and the new Groovy 2.3 JSON parser are faster than Jackson.”

I contribute to Gson which occasionally gets mentioned. But Gson lags behind Jackson and Boon in benchmarks.

But benchmarks don't tell the whole story.

They measure best-case or common-case scenarios. But both Jackson and Boon are vulnerable to hash denial of service attacks, and behave extremely poorly in the worst case.

I have a 1.2 MiB JSON file with 100,000 keys that all share a common hash code. Gson parses this file in 150 milliseconds. But Boon and Jackson take 100x longer: over 15 seconds to parse the same file. Hash collision performance is exponential, so doubling the file size quadruples parse time for Boon and Jackson.

An attacker could tie up all of your servers with just a few megabytes of malicious data. If you use current releases of Boon or Jackson, you’re vulnerable to DoS attacks.

Unfortunately, the benchmark race focuses on top

Flaky tests are the worst. They break the continuous build, the presubmit checks and confidence in the test suite.

Fixing flaky tests is unpleasant because you need a way to reliably reproduce something unreliable. And a way to confirm that you've fixed it. I prefer brute force:

  @Test public void pushPromiseStream() {
    // This test is flaky.
    ...
  }

@Test public void pushPromiseStream1000x() {
    // This test fails quite reliably!
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
      System.out.println(i);
      SpdyConnectionTest test = new SpdyConnectionTest();
      test.setUp();
      test.pushPromiseStream();
      test.tearDown();
    }
  }

The looping test finds the problem. I fix it. Then I can delete the looping test which has served its purpose.

There's probably better ways to do this, but this approach works for me.