I’ve been to a TON of developer conferences and by a landslide my favorite is the Winter Tech Forum (which used to be the Java Posse Roundup). Here is why… Learning for me is experiential.

Typical eyes-forward conferences are like being a passenger on a sail boat. I can watch what is happening but I could definitely not become the captain based on my experience as a passenger. This is what makes WTF different; every attendee is a captain (or maybe a skipper if you are new). The whole conference is the experiences that the attendees want to have. Sometimes that means we write code together, explore new technologies, or discuss ideas. Those experiences have made a significant impact on my technical skills. We also eat together and play together which has helped me build some amazing relationships.

This year at Dreamforce I presented a session that walked through a few of the ways to integrate Heroku apps with Salesforce. Here is the session description:

Combining customer-facing apps on Heroku with employee-facing apps on Salesforce enables a whole new generation of connected and intelligent experiences. There are four primary ways to do this integration: Heroku Connect, Canvas, Apex / Process Callouts, and the Salesforce REST APIs. Using code and architectural examples, we’ll walk through these different methods. You will walk away knowing when you should use each and how to use them.

Getting started with new technologies is usually a huge pain. Often I stumble around for hours trying to get an app’s toolchain setup correctly. Instructions are usually like:

Things get worse when I lead workshops for hundreds of enterprise developers where many are on Windows machines and not very comfortable with cmd.exe.

Experiencing this pain over-and-over is what led me to create Typesafe Activator as a smooth way to get started with Play Framework, Akka, and Scala. Developers have been thrilled with how easy taking their first step with Activator is but I never finished polishing the experience of the second step: App Deployment.

Over the past 10 years the ways we build and deliver applications has changed significantly. It seems like much of this change has happened overnight but don’t worry, it is perfectly normal to look up and feel disoriented in the 2015 deployment landscape.

This article compares the deployment in 2005 with “modern” deployment so that all the new terms and techniques will make sense. Forewarning: My background is primarily Java / JVM so I will use that terminology but try to make the ideas polyglot.

In most cases a web request shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds to return a response so it is for good reason that Heroku has a 30 second request timeout. But there are times when things just take a while. There are different methods for dealing with this. Where possible, the best solution is to offload the job from the web request queue and have a background job queue that can be scaled separately. If the requestor needs the result then it can either poll for it or be pushed the value when the background job is complete. Yet there are some cases where this is overkill. For instance, if a web request takes a while but the user interaction must remain blocked (e.g. a modal spinner) until the request is complete, then setting up background jobs for slow requests can be unnecessary.

Recently Christophe Coenraets and I put together some thoughts on what we are calling “Multi-Sensory Applications” - a new way to think about how we build more deeply connected and engaging software. These news types of applications go way beyond typical CRUD apps by composing together a fabric of inputs (senses) and weaving them together through transducers. Here is a short demo of a very simple MSA that I built to show how IoT devices can be connected with back-office business processes:

Right now there is a ton of hype and pushback around Microservices. Most of the current debate revolves around when Microservices make sense with smart people arguing all across the spectrum. As with all architectural topics the right answer is “it depends” so you should never blindly chose Microservices without understanding your goals and how they align with Microservices.

Using the open source WebJars project as an example I’d like to walk through a process of deciding where to use Microservices and then refactor part of the webjars.org app to a Microservice. First a little background on WebJars… WebJars are JavaScript & CSS libraries packaged into Jar files and published on Maven Central for easy consumption by JVM build tools. The webjars.org site is a Play Framework + Scala app that provides search, publishing, and file service for the jsDelivr CDN.

A few months ago I launched Bower WebJars which provides a way for anyone to deploy Bower packages into Maven Central through WebJars. Since then 539 packages have been deployed! Today I’ve added NPM WebJars which is built on the same foundation as Bower WebJars but for NPM packages.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes. If you are curious about the changes to make this happen, check out the pull request.

My favorite new feature on Heroku is the GitHub Integration which enables auto-deployment of GitHub repos. Whenever a change is made on GitHub the app can be automatically redeployed on Heroku. You can even tell Heroku to wait until the CI tests pass before doing the deployment. I now use this on almost all of my Heroku apps because it allows me to move faster and do less thinking (which I’m fond of).

Lately I’ve built a few apps that have relational data. Instead of trying to shoehorn that data into a NoSQL model I decided to use the awesome Heroku Postgres service but I didn’t want to lose out on the Reactiveness that most of the NoSQL data stores support. I discovered ScalikeJDBC-Async which uses postgresql-async, a Reactive (non-blocking), JDBC-ish, Postgres driver. With those libraries I was able to keep my data relational and my app Reactive all the way down. Lets walk through how to do it in a Play Framework app. (TL;DR: Jump to the the full source.)