Building a Spring Cloud Native Microservice Application on Azure, Part 1

Zach Gardner Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Microservices, Spring Leave a Comment

The big three cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, in that order) have their various strengths and areas of expertise. Most large organizations though typically pick one cloud provider for their cloud computing needs. This works well if you’re a Java shop that’s on AWS, or a Microsoft shop on Azure. But what if you’re on a large Java project in an organization that wants to use Azure? You’re in luck.

Microsoft Azure has come a long way, and is very supportive of non-Microsoft technologies. The proof though is in the pudding. Which is where this blog post comes in. I take Josh Long’s Bootiful Microservice Services, a great starting point to get a cloud native Spring microservice application up and running, and show how it can be run on Azure.

This first blog post will be all about setting up our basic microservices by walking through the various parts of Josh’s example application, with some best practices and patterns that I’ve found to be effective. Rather than a simplistic ToDo application, we’ll be basing our application off of my favorite bagel shop in New York, Original Bagel Boss in Hicksville, to manage its orders, inventory, etc. If we can run a bagel shop on a Spring application running on Azure, and keep customers happy and full of carbohydrates, then it proves out for applications of a similar size and complexity.

We’ll be staying mostly inside the familiar Java confines, then slowly start working our way out to getting our application deployed to Azure. Then we’ll start introducing additional complexity like Spring Batch jobs, a React front end, etc. A setup this complex will show that Azure is ready for prime time when it comes to running applications in production, even if they are built on non-Microsoft technologies…

Running Your Life With Emacs

Garrett Hopper Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming Leave a Comment

I program a lot, but I also do a lot of other things using a computer.

The problem is, I often want to use the same efficient key bindings I use while programming when I’m doing other tasks. I want to be writing an email or documentation and edit a code snippet in the same way I normally edit code. I want to manage Git repositories right from my editor without having to touch the mouse. I want to browse the web in my editor, so I can easily copy code examples and run them. I want to track my to-do lists and the amount of time spent on each task.

Imagine if there was a tool that could do all that and a ton more in an efficiently consistent way. That tool is Emacs…

Into the Core

James Bradley .NET, .NET Core, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

The client I’m currently assisting has begun to move applications from more monolithic architecture into a more modern, cloud-based architecture. The organization is a bit of a .NET anomaly in that it is a company that’s primarily Java, yet has some .NET.

So even though Microsoft has a list of framework tools (such as Azure Service Fabric and Azure App Service), it’s fair to say that asking a primarily Java-focused company to use those tools could be an uphill battle. This is where .NET Standard and .NET Core have come to the rescue.

I work with a ton of smart people and I’m pretty amazed at how fast they can pick up on things from reading. I, however, cannot really understand it fully until I touch it. So let’s build a quick RESTful Web API step by step to see how challenging it is. We’ll be using .NET Standard, .NET Core, and ASP.NET Core.

Creating a Slack Bot

Brice McIver Articles, Conversational Apps, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js Leave a Comment

If you have ever worked on a team project, then you’ve needed some way to communicate with your team. For a very small team with all of its members based in one place, face-to-face communication might be your go-to method of handling project conversations.

However, once your project size progresses past that point, there’s a good chance that you’ll at least evaluate using a collaborative software package to help manage your project. Slack is a popular option for this.

In this blog, I’ll show the basic steps you can take to integrate Slack with your existing tools and workflows. In particular, we will set up Slack for incoming webhooks and event subscriptions, showing how to program a Slack bot to say personalized “Welcome to the channel” and a “Goodbye” messages.

Let’s get started…

money

Modernization: COBOL Batch Processing to Spring Batch

Keyhole Software Banking & Finance, Java, Mainframe, Modernization, New Development, Spring Batch

The Keyhole team worked to modernize the organization’s enterprise batch processing applications. This project included converting a long list of COBOL batch processing applications into Java-based batch applications using the Spring Batch framework. The project encompasses a wide range of tasks from calculating and assessing fees, to processing large vendor fees, and running recon reports.