This year at IBM Interconnect I did my first Ignite talk. If you are not familiar with what an Ignite talk is, check out this video on how to give one.
In my previous three posts (Building “Bootiful” Java Apps, Building REST APIs With Spring Boot, Securing REST APIs With Spring Boot) I have described how to build and secure a Spring Boot app. In the final post in this series we will deploy the app to IBM Bluemix. If you don’t already have a Bluemix account you can register for a free 30 day trial. Spring Boot apps can be packaged as either a war or a jar, however there is a small benefit to deploying your application as a war when deploying to Bluemix. Since the jar will contain Tomcat it has some extra size. When you package your application as a war the Tomcat dependencies are removed so the package is smaller and there is less to push over the wire.
IBM InterConnect, IBM’s cloud and mobile conference, is about a month away at this point. At this years event there is a mini developer focused event called Dev@InterConnect. It is kind of like a conference inside a conference in that it is 2 days of all developer focused topics. The first day consists of different “camps”. There are camps on cloud, mobile, Watson, and DevOps. On day two there will be what we are calling “Open Talk” sessions. The Open Talk sessions will be run like an unconference. The main idea behind an unconference is that there is no preplanned agenda. The agenda is built the day the conference starts. People propose topics for sessions and then the attendees decide which ones they would like to hear. This year I proposed an Open Talk session on microservices and how microservices relates to agile development, devops, and the cloud. Below is the title and abstract of my session
I have been using Node-RED as part of Bluemix for a while now, it is super easy to build some pretty powerful applications by just dragging, dropping, and configuring “nodes” right in your browser. 90% of the time you don’t need to write any code, and when you do, the code is very simplistic. I find Node-RED to be a great tool for getting something up an running quickly, for example when building a prototype or participating in a hackathon. In a couple weeks I will be doing a workshop on Node-RED at DeveloperWeek in San Francisco so I have been working on my slides and some examples for the workshop. For one of my examples, I wanted to show how easy it was to interact with web services using Node-RED and thought that making it relate to San Francisco would make for a really nice example for the workshop. I know BART (the subway system in San Franscisco) had some pretty robust APIs so I decided to check them out. After a couple minutes of looking at the APIs I thought it would be nice if I could drop pins on a Google Map for all the BART stations in San Fran. This has probably been done a million times before, but that wasn’t the point of this exercise, I wanted to show how easy it was to do in Node-RED.
In my previous post I described how to build REST APIs with Spring Boot. One glaring omission to that post was security. Security can be a daunting part of building any app because if you get it wrong there are huge implications. Luckily with Spring Boot, like with most other things, adding security to your applications is pretty simple.
Building upon my previous blog post on Spring Boot, I would now like to talk about building REST APIs with Spring Boot. For the past 3 years or so, I have not created a web application that did not have REST APIs. REST has become the go to way for building web services in today’s applications. I am not going to spend time discussing what REST is or why it is so popular so if you are not familiar with REST and the benefits of building REST APIs there are plenty of good resources out there discussing these topics that I suggest your read first. In this blog post I would like to describe how easy it is to build a REST API that persists data to a Mongo database. (There is nothing specific about building REST APIs with Mongo DB in Spring Boot. You can easily replace Mongo with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Couch DB, or any other DB technology you would like to use.)
A few months ago when I started to learn Node.js I came across code that looked like this
Greetings from Strata + Hadoop World in Barcelona Spain. Yesterday was a big day for Bluemix with two major announcements.
A few weeks ago we moved the Internet of Things service out of beta indicating it was ready for prime time. This was exciting news except for the fact that it introduced some breaking changes, code written against the beta IoT service would most likely not work with the new service. This included code I had written a few months ago to demonstrate the beta IoT service. I finally had some time to go back and update this code so it works with the new IoT service. The new code is now available in the GitHub repo. In addition to updating the code I thought I would create an updated video of how to use the IoT service. Check it out below!
