Ryan J. Baxter

Over the past few weeks I have been teaching myself about Node.js.  One of the tutorials I followed was a step by step guide to getting up and running with Node.js, Express, Jade, and MongoDB.  After I finished the tutorial and had the app running locally I wanted to get it deployed in the cloud on BlueMix, so I began to investigate what I had to modify in order to do this.  After reviewing the code one thing jumped out to me the I knew immediately would be a problem.  Want to take a guess at what that is?  No?  OK, it is the URL to the Mongo database.  After completing the tutorial you are left with an app that had a hardcoded DB URL.  Obviously deploying the code with the hardcoded URL was not going to work.  First before I go into what I had to change, I think a little background is necessary.

Yesterday there was a new release of the Cloud Foundry plugin for Eclipse. The plugin allows developers using Eclipse to push their apps to a Cloud Foundry instance from within their Eclipse dev environment.  This includes BlueMix as well. It integrates nicely into the Servers view of your Eclipse dev environment and behaves just like a Tomcat server instance would.  Below is a summery of what is in the new release.  You can install the new version from the Eclipse Marketplace or by installing the update site.

The replay of the IBM Pulse 2014 OGS is now available for you to watch if you missed it live yesterday.  One of the key announcements from yesterdays OGS was the introduction of Codename: BlueMix.  The entire OGS is worth watching but if you are interested in the BlueMix announcement go to minute 38 in the video.

BlueMix will help you save Earth from a robot apocalypse….

As I get closer to my 6 year anniversary at IBM (I’m almost 2 months away), I have decided it is time to try something new.  No I am not leaving IBM  I am just taking a new role within a new organization.  Starting March 1st I will be part of a team of developer advocates within IBM’s Emerging Internet Technologies group, ET for short.  My primary focus in my developer advocacy role will be to help promote IBM’s new PaaS offering codenamed BlueMix.  I am really excited about this new opportunity for a number of reasons.  First, it allows me to help build a developer ecosystem full time!  While I was with ICS this was something I did on the side because I liked working with other developers and helping them build cool apps, now it will be my primary focus :).  Secondly, it is in a completely different space than I was working in before.  There is a whole bunch of new technologies and programming models at play, which gets the geek inside of me really excited.    Third BlueMix is an offering from IBM like I have not seen before, and it is not just limited to the enterprise. Check out my blog post about BlueMix.

I have uploaded my slides from Connect 2014 to slideshare.  You can find them here.

Earlier this week I posted a blog about what I will be showing at IBM Connect.  Earlier this week we updated the IBM SBT Playground on Greenhouse which includes the new OpenSocial functionality I talked about in my blog post and demos at my Jumpstart on Sunday.  In addition we published a release of the SDK which includes a new version of the NSF for the Playground and the OSGi bundles for allowing you to render gadgets within your own XPages apps.  There is a sample of how to do this in the SBT Sample App which shows you a very basic example of how you can render gadgets in your app.  If you want to learn more check out this wiki page.

IBM Connect 2014 is just a few days away, I can’t believe it!  I will be speaking again this year and again doing a revamp of the JumpStart on OpenSocial I did last year.  The JumpStart (JMP103) will be on Sunday at 8AM, so please don’t party too hard on Saturday night and come and check it out.  I decided it would be good to give everyone a quick preview of what we will be talking about and demoing this year, so I have created a quick (18 min) video.

Today I released version 0.0.2 of the OpenSocial Explorer.  From an end user perspective not a lot has changed, although there are a couple of differences.

Today I would like to say thank you to the one and only Bruce Elgort.  He is a true thought leader and advocate of all things technology.  Obviously Bruce’s greatest contribution to the IBM community has been his work as chairman of OpenNTF.  I am sure everyone knows that OpenNTF wouldn’t be what it is today without Bruce’s involvement.  For me personally, Bruce has always been there to give honest feedback about the features and products I work on as an IBMer.  I trust his opinion and appreciate his honesty and he always provides me with great perspectives on the things I work on.  So #thanksbruce for all that you have done with OpenNTF and all you continue to do for everyone in the community!