Ryan J. Baxter

We are now about 24 hours away from tomorrows BlueMix Virtual Meetup.  This being our first meetup, the content will mainly be introductory and if the demo gods are with us we should have some live demos as well (with real live coding!!!).  I had some trouble using Google+ events, I did not realize that an On Air Event is different than a normal event with a hangout.  Oh well, it shouldn’t cause too much confusion.  You can find the on air broadcast event here, or if you prefer you can go directly to the YouTube page here.  This is all linked to from the original Google+ event as well.  If you want you can also come back to this blog post to view the live broadcast using the YouTube video below.  Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow at 10 AM EST!

We are now a week away from next weeks virtual BlueMix Meetup.  Next weeks event will be mostly technical and targeting developers looking to get started building apps with BlueMix.  We will cover the a wide range of topics in enough detail that you should feel confident enough to push your first app after we are done.   If you can’t make it, there will a recording of the meetup that will be available after the meetup is over.  I will also make the slides available on SlideShare.  I look forward to talking to everyone next week!

The ToDo app is one of the most popular samples to build when learning new languages and frameworks.  Only the Hello World sample is more popular.  While Hello World makes you feel accomplished, it generally leaves you with more questions than answers.  To really understand how things are working you need to build something a little more complex.

Using manifests when deploying your applications to BlueMix or any Cloud Foundry deployment makes your deployments simple and consistent.  They are a requirement for using the deployment features in the IBM Dev Ops services but have many benefits even when doing development locally.  If you have very robust cf push commands it is much simpler to put all the parameters in a manifest so you don’t have to type them out each time.  The problem is that for newbies and people who are not familiar with YAML, writing a manifest can take a little effort, not because it is hard but because the syntax is tricky.  I got tired of having to go to the Cloud Foundry documentation each time I wanted to create a manifest so I wrote a simple web app that will do it for you.  Using the web app you just fill out the form and your manifest is generated for you.  You can preview the manifest by clicking the Preview button and once you are satisfied with it you can click the Download button the save the file to your machine.  There are even tooltips for each field you need to fill out.  Hopefully this helps everyone else as much as it helps me

As some of you are aware IBM has been creating a large number of local meetups around BlueMix.  I know that not everyone can attend these for one reason or another so I thought why not try to have a virtual BlueMix Meetup?  Our first virtual meetup will be on May 21st at 10 AM EST.  We will be using Google Hangouts and the recording will be available on YouTube if you can’t make it.  For this first meetup event your presenter will be yours truly and I will be giving an introduction to BlueMix for developers.  That is right, this meetup will be developer focused!  After all, developers are the main users of BlueMix :).  I plan on giving an introduction to the basic topics and concepts every developer will need to know to get their first app deployed on BlueMix, there might even be a demo or two ;).  If you are at all interested in using BlueMix I suggest you join.  Click the image below and respond Yes! on the event page to indicate you are going.  Please feel free to re-share, Tweet, and blog about this event, the more attendees the better the event is for everyone!

Yesterday I published a new sample application to our Codename: BlueMix organization on GitHub called BlueChatter.  BlueChatter is a chat / IRC-like application for your browser.  You enter a user name and then you can send messages.  If someone else is also using the app they will instantly see whatever messages you send.  Obviously this is not going to replace Skype or your favorite IRC client, instead it is meant to demonstrate how to scale your application in BlueMix.

You may have noticed the JazzHub DevOps service in the BlueMix catalog as you have been poking around.  If you have not played around with it yet I suggest you get to it!

I was supposed to present last Monday at the Boston Cloud Meetup on Cloud Foundry but my daughter was born the day before so I missed it.  One of my colleagues stepped in and did the presentation for me but I figured I would share the slides with everyone anyways.

I am sure everyone has heard about the Heartbleed bug by now.  If you haven’t, where have you been?  Even the Today show was talking about it

As most of you know, you can deploy an app that uses virtually any runtime to BlueMix.  As long as there is a buildpack for the runtime, your app will run on BlueMix.  Of course knowing the ins and outs of using the buildpack for your runtime can be a little tricky sometimes.  That is why over the past few weeks I have been working on implementing a ToDo application in Java, Node, Sinatra, Python, and PHP.  This idea was inspired by todomvc.com which is dedicated to showing developers how to use various client side JavaScript frameworks by implementing the same ToDo app.  The ToDo apps we have built have the same goal, but instead each app uses the same client side framework (JQuery and Backbone) while implementing the server side code in various languages.  As I am sure you can tell we just took the client side framework right from the todomvc.com Backbone example.  The source code should be open sourced soon, but until then here is a quick demo.