Ryan J. Baxter

This past week I have been working on writing an app in PHP and getting it deployed on BlueMix.  The first thing I did before I started was take a look at the buildpacks that were available.  Last week I made the mistake of picking one without trying it first and wasted a huge amount of time trying to figure out what was wrong with my app when it ended up being a problem with the buildpack.  This time I decided I would put in a little effort into seeing which ones worked first.  Browsing the Cloud Foundry community builpacks page I found three PHP buildpacks to choose from.  I created a very simple PHP app and tried all three, they all worked with the simple app so I just had to pick one.  I ended up choosing this one for a couple of reasons.

My colleague David Barnes has created a new video demonstrating BlueMix.  In this video he walks through a scenario where an HR departments wants to build an app to help find candidates for a job using LinkedIn.  Check it out below.  If you want to know some of the nitty gritty details about how deploying an app works check out my blog post on how to deploy a Java app to BlueMix.

In my previous video I took you through a tour of the BlueMix UI, but we didn’t actually go through pushing an application up to BlueMix and seeing the results.  Well no fear, I have created videos for that as well.  I actually split this up into two videos.  In the first one we create a Java app in the BlueMix UI, download the code for the app, make some changes, and then push it back to BlueMix.  In part two we learn about scaling our Java app and how to take advantage of the services in BlueMix to deal with the elasticity of the cloud.  Below are the videos AND the code I wrote during the demonstration.

For the past 2 days I have been trying to get a very simple Python app deployed and running on BlueMix.  This proved to be a little challenging because there were no clear cut instructions or simple examples to go by (that I could find at first), and I had never written any Python before.  After spending most of the day yesterday talking to some expert IBMers I eventually got a simple hello world Python app using Flask deployed to BlueMix.  Later on, I came across this project on GitHub which covers everything I am about to tell you and would have saved me two days of aggravation, but that is software development for you.  Here are the three “gotchas” that I ran into over the past few days, hope this saves others some time.

One of first things everyone will do once they get access to the open beta of BlueMix is explore what they can do in the UI.  Here is a 15 minute, introduction to the UI of BlueMix to show you what its all about.  Hopefully you learn about something you didn’t know you could do.  If you haven’t signed up for the open beta I encourage you to do so, IT IS FREE!  Enjoy!

A few days ago IBM published a video of the demo app build ontop of BlueMix shown during the OGS at IBM Pulse.  You can find the video on YouTube or check it out below.

Over the weekend there were two questions posted to the BlueMix forum about using custom domains with apps deployed to BlueMix.  (Both questions were posted by the same person.)  Excellent question!  In fact it is pretty easy to do, it basically involves telling BlueMix about your domain name and then creating a CNAME record pointing towards app.ng.bluemix.net.  See the answers to the forum questions for the details.

One of the best features of Cloud Foundry and BlueMix is the services available for developers to integrate into their apps.  The first step in using any of these services is creating them.  You can create them in various ways, through the BlueMix UI, with the command line, with the Cloud Foundry Maven plugin, and with a manifest.yml file.  In almost every situation where you are creating the service you need will need to know the name and the plan.  Up until know I have been figuring out this information by looking through the BlueMix documentation but today I found out about the cf marketplace command that will give you details about all the services on BlueMix right in your command line!  Here is what the output looks like after executing the command

If you are looking for a place to discuss all things BlueMix please join the BlueMix Enthusiasts group on LinkedIn.

MyMenu won the app dev throwdown held at IBM Pulse last week.  They created an app that incorporated mobile and analytics and runs on BlueMix and Softlayer.  Here is the marketing video they put together describing the app and how they built it.