In-memory MongoDB for unit and integration tests

A few weeks ago I found myself having to fix a bug in a production system which uses MongoDB as its primary means of storage. As I was unfamiliar with the codebase, we had just taken over the project, the first thing you do is trying to find the test covering this functionality.

Jaw drop; no test in sight. What was the case, none of the interactions with the backing storage was under any form of testing. So it could happen that a simple aggregation query wasn't returning the expected results

This was my first project in which I used MongoDB, coming from projects using HSQLDB to test the validity and outcome of queries, the first thing that flashed through my mind was in-memory MongoDB. The first hit on Google wasn't promising http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10005697/does-mongo-db-have-an-in-memory-mode, but luckily some following results hit the jackpot.

CSRF / XSRF protection using Spring Security

The last few years there is an almost constant stream of news articles about some company leaking customer information one way or the other. While not all of these leaks are caused by badly protected websites themselves, a lot are caused by misconfigurations in the web/data servers, programmers still have a hard time integrating some basic protection against attacks.