Ventures of an ex indie game developer

Learning Java 8

I just built a small tool for a friend Dala. Dala runs an IT+hosting company and offers different backup solutions to his customers. Every day, he gets an e-mail per backup job. Currently 40-ish e-mails per day from four different backup suppliers.

I've automated the task of processing the e-mails, updating a database and posting a ticket whenever one or more backups goes to shit. This is right now 330 lines of Python code in a single source file (along with a couple of settings files for various e-mail accounts, etc.) Yesterday I was interviewed for a consultancy job where they use modern Java 8, so I'll try and convert whatever hack I have right now into pretty, modern Java using streams, lambdas, spring boot and whatnot and hopefully I'll be up to speed soon enough.

These are the features required:
  • IMAP login and fetch,
  • parse e-mails of various mime encodings, etc.,
  • move e-mails,
  • connect and update an (SQLite) DB,
  • serve a web page showing the latest status of each customer.


I expect this to become in the vicinity of 6 java files and 900 sloc if done "right," while still keeping all the sloppy hard-coding from the original.

About the author

Mitt foto
Gothenburg, Sweden