AWS SNS Push Notifications

Matt McCandless AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies, Java 1 Comment

Have you ever received endless notifications from the latest application you just downloaded? For example, a bank application that tells you your balance is less than $50. It is likely a message sent directly to your phone through Apple Push Notification Service, Firebase Cloud Messaging, or some other like service.

While you can use any of these services directly, there is a lot to gain by using something like AWS SNS to manage, send, and organize your notifications.

In this post, we show an example of the Push Notification feature of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) using Firebase to handle the iOS and Android messages. Code examples are in Java using Eclipse.

Do note that this blog is solely focused on Push Notification feature of SNS. Keep in mind that SNS can be used for email and SMS messaging, but for brevity, we will steer clear of those.

Java Development Using Visual Studio Code

Todd Horn Design, Dev Methodologies, Java, Programming Leave a Comment

Over the last few years, I have worked on several .NET and JavaScript projects. My go-to IDE for Angular, Node, and (in starting to learn) React has been Visual Studio Code, along with Visual Studio Enterprise for C#.

Recently, I started on a new team and project that was in Java. Our initial thought was to switch back over to Spring Tool Suite or IntelliJ. But, there are some really good extensions now for Java in VS Code that made that transition unnecessary. So we decided to take a look at what Visual Studio code could do for us – we were very pleasantly surprised!

In this post, I provide links and information to get you started down the right path for Java in Visual Studio Code.

Java-Based UI Frameworks

Rik Scarborough Java, Programming 1 Comment

In today’s development environment, there is an abundance of frameworks that we can choose from for front-end or user interface (UI) work.

I was recently talking with a friend about UI development. He has also been a programmer since programming was considered an arcane art (when those of us that did it were considered like Gandalf the Grey facing the Balrog). Or maybe we just saw ourselves that way. Regardless, both of us have been Java programmers for a great deal of that time.

We both lamented the fact that it was a context switch to go from coding most of our projects in Java, then needing to switch to JavaScript for the front end.

Based on conversations I’ve seen online, several readers are warming up their keyboards to chide me for complaining about having to code in JavaScript. Keep your keys cool, both of us and our co-workers are experienced in, and happy to write in, JavaScript and any of its frameworks for our clients. But using JavaScript isn’t always the best approach.

 In this post, we introduce two frameworks that allow you to code your user interface in Java: GWT & Vaadin…

Gaining Docker Image Size Efficiencies By Separating Application Layers

Luke Patterson Development Technologies, Docker, Java, Spring Boot Leave a Comment

Problem

I was pushing a new Docker image tag for each application code commit, and the admins of the private registry were getting annoyed at how much space I was using.

Solution Summary

Yes, I know there are strategies to clean up old tags but I first wanted to reduce the impact of the tags I was pushing. With the right layering strategy, I knew I could reduce the net registry size increase of consecutive tag pushes.

I wanted to only push what had actually changed in the application. In addition to reducing the impact on the registry, having smaller tag deltas could possibly speed up rolling deployments since nodes could potentially have less to download.

Using MongoDB and Spring Boot to Create a RESTful Web Service

Robert Rice Development Technologies, Java, Spring Boot 1 Comment

Spring Boot is a framework designed to simplify the bootstrapping and development of a new Spring application. The framework takes an opinionated approach to configuration, freeing developers from the need to define a boilerplate configuration. MongoDB is a simple set up and easy to use document database. A RESTful API is an application program interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data.

In this post, I will demonstrate the process of creating a RESTful web application with Spring Boot and MongoDB.