Java

This Friday at OSCON 2012 I’ll be doing a presentation about Client/Server Apps with HTML5 and Java. Here is the session description:

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented. This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter Bootstrap, and some CoffeeScript to build the Client. The Server could be anything that talks HTTP but this session will use the Play Framework. You will also learn how to deploy Client/Server web apps on the cloud using a Content Delivery Network (Amazon CloudFront) for the Client and a Cloud Application Provider (Heroku) for the Server.

Tomorrow, May 30th, I will be co-hosting a webinar about Social Enterprise Java Apps on Heroku. The webinar will be at both 2:00 p.m. GMT and 10:00 a.m. PDT. Register at: http://www.developerforce.com/events/webinars/2012-05-30/registration.php?d=70130000000sW7g

Here is the description:

In this webinar you will learn how to build Social Enterprise applications using Salesforce.com, Heroku, and Java. Through live coding and demonstrations you will learn how to instantly deploy and scale Java apps on the cloud with Heroku. You will also learn how to integrate those applications with Salesforce.com and Force.com through REST.

Update: This tutorial is a bit old. For more up-to-date tutorials see: https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/Tutorials

I’ve created a Play 2 Tutorial and posted it on GitHub! The tutorial covers how to:

• Create a Play App
• Set up an IDE
• Start the Play Server
• Routes
• Test a Route
• Update a Controller
• Test a Controller
• Update a View
• Test a View
• Deploy your app on the Cloud with Heroku
• Create a Model
• Create UI for Adding Tasks
• Get Tasks as JSON
• Display the Tasks via CoffeeScript and jQuery
• Make the App Pretty with Twitter Bootstrap
• Add Form Validation
• Update the App on Heroku

Each section has a corresponding branch in git so you can diff against my version to see if you’ve done everything correctly. Right now this is just for Play 2 with Java and Ebean but I’m working on doing this for Play 2 with Scala as well.

Over the next couple weeks I’ll be doing two Java User Group presentations, a Flash Platform User Group presentation and one Webinar. Hope to see you at one of these events:

• Wednesday May 9 - Denver Java User Group:

  Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps in the Cloud

This week I’ll be doing two presentation about Heroku:

• Tuesday May 1 - 5:30 PM at the Denver Open Source Users Group:
  Heroku Cloud Computing Platform

Hope to see you there!

Last week I announced the WebJars project that allows you to specify your web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as dependencies in your Java web applications. With some help from Jeremy Grelle I was able to get a simple WebJars Spring MVC example working.

First you will need to add the WebJars repository to your build. For Maven, just add the following to your “pom.xml” build file:

<repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>webjars</id>
            <url>http://webjars.github.com/m2</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

Then add a WebJar dependency, like Twitter Bootstrap:

Update: I’ve created a Spring MVC WebJars example.
Update 2: Ukrainian translation here - http://softdroid.net/vvedennya-webjars by Eclipse Android.
Update 3: WebJars.org has been officially launched! Learn more.

Our web apps are using more and more web libraries like jQuery, Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap. The traditional way to use those libraries is to locate & download the JavaScript and CSS source then just copy it into a project. To me this resembles how we used to just copy JAR files into a project’s WEB-INF/lib dir. But why not do with web libraries like we now do with Java libraries and specify them as managed dependencies? This allows us to declaratively set the version, use a consistent version across an application, and easily deal with transitive dependencies. Then we just need web frameworks that can serve static assets from JAR files and we are good to go! Luckily Play 2 and Dropwizard both have out-of-the-box support for this. So I decided to give it a try…

This week I will be presenting about Running Java, Scala, and Play apps on Heroku at the Houston JUG and at No Fluff Just Stuff in Reston, VA:

• Houston JUG - Wednesday April 25 at 6:30pm
  Running Java and Play! Apps on the Cloud

Hope to see you there!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a few presentations about Java, Scala, Play Framework 2, HTML5, and Heroku:

• Wednesday April 11 @ 11:30am - Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (Philedephia, PA) - HTML5 Apps in Java & Scala with the Play Framework

• Wednesday April 18 @ 13:30 - Devoxx (Paris, France) - Developing, Deploying and Scaling in the Cloud with Play

• Thursday April 19 @ 14:30 - Devoxx (Paris, France) - Client/Server Apps with HTML5 and Java

This week I’ll will be doing a few presentations about running Java and Play apps on Heroku:

• Portsmouth, NH on Tuesday March 20 @ 6:30pm - Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps on the Cloud
• DevNexus in Atlanta, GA on Wednesday March 21 @ 2:30pm - Introduction to Heroku
• DevNexus in Atlanta, GA on Thursday March 22 @ 2:30pm - Intro to Play Framework

Hope to see you there!