This year at OSCON I will be leading a hands-on lab and presenting about Reactive, Play Framework, and Scala. Here are two sessions: Reactive All The Way Down (lab) - 9:00am Monday, July 21 In this tutorial you will build a Reactive application with Play Framework, Scala, WebSockets, and AngularJS. We will get started with a template app in Typesafe Activator. Then we will add a Reactive RESTful JSON service and a WebSocket in Scala.

Bruce Eckel will be hosting the Scala Summit in Crested Butte again this summer. The Open Spaces conference will be September 15 - 19 which is a perfect time of year up in the Colorado Rockies. The theme of the Scala Summit this year is Scala vs. The New Features in Java 8. So there will definitely be some fascinating discussions. I’m also looking forward to working on some IoT projects during the hackathons.

As part of the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Android Wear I created a Gradle plugin that fetches and deploys Salesforce code (Apex). Gradle is the default build tool for Android but it can also be used with many other languages. For instance, here is an example build.gradle file for a project that fetches all of the Apex classes and Visualforce pages: buildscript { repositories { mavenLocal() mavenCentral() } dependencies { classpath 'com.

Webhooks are the modern, web-oriented way for servers to receive notifications from other servers. For instance, when an event happens on a server, like Salesforce.com, your own custom application can receive the event via a web request. Salesforce already has a built-in way to handle events called Triggers which run on Salesforce via Apex code. However, you may want to receive these events in your own custom application. In Salesforce it is pretty easy to write the Apex to do this but why not automate that process?

By default browsers limit access to cross-origin resources. For instance, if a JavaScript app is loaded from foo.com then it isn’t allowed to access content from bar.com because this would be a significant security hole. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is the way to workaround this limitation in modern browsers. Salesforce.com has a great REST api but unfortunately it doesn’t yet have native CORS support (but you can vote for this feature).

Right out of the gate in my new job at Salesforce.com and I have been working on a pretty exciting new project to integrate clouds and humans using Salesforce.com and Android Wear. This week Salesforce launched six new open source developers packs for wearables. I created the Salesforce Wear Pack for Android Wear to help developers start building cloud-driven wearable apps for emerging devices like smart watches. Check out a short demo of the sample app I built:

Popularized by GitHub, Webhooks are the modern way for apps to receive notifications / events from other servers. But testing Webhooks has always been pretty painful, especially if you want to automate those tests. So I created a little app to make it easier. Before we get into that lets cover the basics… A Webhook is a way for you to define a URL that is called by another service when a particular event occurs.

Yesterday I started playing around with gulp which is a build tool for JavaScript applications. My goal was to have a build for a fully client-side application built with AngularJS and Bootstrap. In modern JavaScript apps we now need a build tool to compile various pieces, manage libraries, do production transformations (like minification), and to provide a nice development cycle when working on a project. I created a Gulp Starter project that has the following:

Next week I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Boulder and Denver Java User Groups. Here is the session description: Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets.

Modern web applications are a mix of a back-end services, dynamic web pages, custom static assets, and library-based static assets. To maintain a productive development process it is easiest to have all this stuff in one project. But in production there are a number of optimizations that can dramatically speed up the loading of the application. HTTP 304, Not Modified, responses enable the browser to not re-download an entire static asset a second time.