Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)

Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)

Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)

Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)

Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)

Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)

Do JSON right with Jackson

Download the E-book

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)

Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

Download the E-book

eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)

Get Started with Apache Maven:

Download the E-book

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)

Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)

Building a REST API with Spring?

Download the E-book

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)

Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)

Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)

Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)

All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

>> GET THE COURSE
Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)

Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)

End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Partner – MongoDB – NPI EA (tag=MongoDB)

Traditional keyword-based search methods rely on exact word matches, often leading to irrelevant results depending on the user's phrasing.

By comparison, using a vector store allows us to represent the data as vector embeddings, based on meaningful relationships. We can then compare the meaning of the user’s query to the stored content, and retrieve more relevant, context-aware results.

Explore how to build an intelligent chatbot using MongoDB Atlas, Langchain4j and Spring Boot:

>> Building an AI Chatbot in Java With Langchain4j and MongoDB Atlas

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll explore different approaches to sorting a string array according to the element’s length.

2. Comparator

When we work on sorting in Java, we often define a Comparator that returns the order between two arguments. The sorting algorithm applies the sort order generated by the Comparator and returns the sorted result.

When defining a Comparator, we implement the following method:

int compare(T o1, T o2);

According to the Java API, this method must return a negative value if o1 is smaller than o2, zero if both are equal or a positive value if o1 is greater than o2.

In our examples in the latter sections, we’ll use this unsorted string array for illustration purposes:

String[] inputArray = new String[] {"am", "today", "too", "I", "busy"};

We expect the following array when inputArray is sorted by the string length:

String[] SORTED = new String[] {"I", "am", "too", "busy", "today"};

3. Comparison by Custom Comparator

The most trivial way is to define a custom string Comparator that compares numerically based on the string length:

public class StringLengthComparator implements Comparator<String> {
    @Override
    public int compare(String s1, String s2) {
        return Integer.compare(s1.length(), s2.length());
    }
}

We’ll call Array.sort() for sorting an array. In our case, we must provide the second argument, our custom comparator. Otherwise, the sorting will be based on the natural ordering:

@Test
void whenSortByCustomComparator_thenArraySorted() {
    StringLengthComparator comparator = new StringLengthComparator();
    Arrays.sort(inputArray, comparator);
    assertThat(inputArray).isEqualTo(SORTED);
}

Depending on our need, we could define an anonymous class instead of a separate class if the Comparator is for one-off usage:

@Test
void whenSortByInnerClassComparator_thenArraySorted() {
    Arrays.sort(inputArray, new Comparator<String>() {
        @Override
        public int compare(String s1, String s2) {
            return Integer.compare(s1.length(), s2.length());
        }
    });
    assertThat(inputArray).isEqualTo(SORTED);
}

4. Comparison by Lambda Expression

Since Java 8 introduced lambda expression, we can simplify the previous approach by supplying the lambda expression rather than using an anonymous class. A lambda is an anonymous function that can be passed around as an object.

With lambda expression, we can pass the comparison function to Array.sort() as the second argument, without explicitly defining any class. This highly improves the readability of the code:

@Test
void whenSortedByLambda_thenArraySorted() {
    Arrays.sort(inputArray, (s1, s2) -> Integer.compare(s1.length(), s2.length()));
    assertThat(inputArray).isEqualTo(SORTED);
}

The example does the same as in the previous section. It’s just much neater when we define it using lambda expression.

5. Comparison by Comparing Function

Java 8 also introduced convenient comparison static functions in the Comparator class.

Comparator.comparingInt() is the one that we can adopt here. This static function accepts a method reference that returns an integer. For the following example, we’ll apply String::length as the method reference that obtains the length of the string:

@Test
void whenSortedByComparingInt_thenArraySorted() {
    Arrays.sort(inputArray, Comparator.comparingInt(String::length));
    assertThat(inputArray).isEqualTo(SORTED);
}

Again, this does the same as the previous one with an even more simplified syntax.

6. Conclusion

In this article, we explored different approaches to sorting. It’s based on supplying to Array.sort() a dedicated Comparator that sorts an array of strings based on their lengths.

The Comparator can be created from a custom Comparator class, a lambda expression, or a comparing function.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)

Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)

The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)

Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)

Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)

Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)