| Recent Blog Posts |
99
|
Release Your Inner Developer Advocate!
Fri, Feb 27th 2015 2:52p Ryan- Baxter
This year at IBM Interconnect I did my first Ignite talk. If you are not familiar with what an Ignite talk is, check out this video on how to give one.
The basic idea is that you have 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about your topic. The slides advance every 15 seconds, so that makes things a little more interesting but helps you stay on point
My Ignite talk was titled “Release Your Inner Developer Advocate” and focused on why every developer should be a developer advocate. |
306
|
Bluemix Is Evolving…In A Good Way
Mon, Feb 23rd 2015 1:53p Ryan- Baxter
A year ago when Bluemix was first released in beta it was marketed as a word class enterprise platform-as-a-service in the public cloud. Over the past year Bluemix has evolved in many ways, but two of them have started Bluemix down the path of being more than just a public PaaS.
First, we introduced Bluemix dedicated. Bluemix dedicated was a private single tenant instance of Bluemix running in our Softlayer data centers. This helped address some concerns from customers about having th |
7
|
Deploying Spring Boot Apps To Bluemix
Mon, Feb 2nd 2015 9:36a Ryan- Baxter
In my previous three posts (Building “Bootiful” Java Apps, Building REST APIs With Spring Boot, Securing REST APIs With Spring Boot) I have described how to build and secure a Spring Boot app. In the final post in this series we will deploy the app to IBM Bluemix. If you don’t already have a Bluemix account you can register for a free 30 day trial. Spring Boot apps can be packaged as either a war or a jar, however there is a small benefit to deploying your application as a |
5
|
Want To Learn About Microservices At IBM InterConnect? Vote Now!
Mon, Jan 26th 2015 3:25p Ryan- Baxter
IBM InterConnect, IBM’s cloud and mobile conference, is about a month away at this point. At this years event there is a mini developer focused event called Dev@InterConnect. It is kind of like a conference inside a conference in that it is 2 days of all developer focused topics. The first day consists of different “camps”. There are camps on cloud, mobile, Watson, and DevOps. On day two there will be what we are calling “Open Talk” sessions. The Open Ta |
17
|
Sample Node-RED Flow Using Websockets
Tue, Jan 13th 2015 9:11a Ryan- Baxter
I have been using Node-RED as part of Bluemix for a while now, it is super easy to build some pretty powerful applications by just dragging, dropping, and configuring “nodes” right in your browser. 90% of the time you don’t need to write any code, and when you do, the code is very simplistic. I find Node-RED to be a great tool for getting something up an running quickly, for example when building a prototype or participating in a hackathon. In a couple weeks I will be doi |
17
|
Securing REST APIs With Spring Boot
Tue, Jan 6th 2015 7:14a Ryan- Baxter
In my previous post I described how to build REST APIs with Spring Boot. One glaring omission to that post was security. Security can be a daunting part of building any app because if you get it wrong there are huge implications. Luckily with Spring Boot, like with most other things, adding security to your applications is pretty simple.
All you need to do is add a dependency to your Maven POM. If we take the project from the previous blog post all you need to add is
org.springframewor |
13
|
Building REST APIs With Spring Boot
Wed, Dec 17th 2014 10:11a Ryan- Baxter
Building upon my previous blog post on Spring Boot, I would now like to talk about building REST APIs with Spring Boot. For the past 3 years or so, I have not created a web application that did not have REST APIs. REST has become the go to way for building web services in today’s applications. I am not going to spend time discussing what REST is or why it is so popular so if you are not familiar with REST and the benefits of building REST APIs there are plenty of good resources out |
12
|
Building “Bootiful” Java Apps
Mon, Dec 8th 2014 10:11a Ryan- Baxter
A few months ago when I started to learn Node.js I came across code that looked like thisvar http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World');
}).listen(3000);If you are not familiar with JavaScript, this code starts an HTTP server running on localhost at port 3000 and when you hit http://localhost:3000 it returns the string “Hello World”.
This code isn’t really impress |
8
|
Dedicated Bluemix Instances On Softlayer And Bluemix UK
Fri, Nov 21st 2014 5:12a Ryan- Baxter
Greetings from Strata + Hadoop Worlds in Barcelona Spain. Yesterday was a big day for Bluemix with two major announcements.
The first announcement was the addition of a new Bluemix “region” in the UK. At a high level, this means that you can now deploy and run your apps within our UK data center. This will obviously helps with latency concerns for users you may have in the UK region. Deploying apps to the UK data center in the Bluemix UI is as simple as selecting the the UK r |
2
|
Updated: Bluemix and the Internet of Things
Wed, Nov 12th 2014 2:22p Ryan- Baxter
A few weeks ago we moved the Internet of Things service out of beta indicating it was ready for prime time. This was exciting news except for the fact that it introduced some breaking changes, code written against the beta IoT service would most likely not work with the new service. This included code I had written a few months ago to demonstrate the beta IoT service. I finally had some time to go back and update this code so it works with the new IoT service. The new code is now availab |
5
|
Accessing Application Logs In Bluemix
Wed, Oct 29th 2014 10:14a Ryan- Baxter
Being able to view your application’s log files is essential for any developer. Developers use their log statements to gain insight into what is happening in their application throughout the application lifecycle. Accessing your logs when running your application locally is easy, but when the application is deployed to a remote server things get a little bit trickier. In the past, when deploying your app to your own infrastructure or even infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) you could acce |
5
|
Why I Have Started To Embrace The Command Line
Wed, Oct 1st 2014 12:11p Ryan- Baxter
Last night my tweet inspired a debate on Twitter about the use of the command line. Oddly enough I was in a meeting with a customer yesterday and due to some problem I encountered during my demo I had to open the command line. Once I did this he immediately asked me “Do I need to use the command line?”. (As a side note the person who asked this question was not a developer or system admin.) In addition a few weeks ago at MWLUG, Nathan Freeman, who I have the utmost respect |
11
|
Using Your Domino Data In Apps Deployed To Bluemix
Mon, Sep 22nd 2014 6:11a Ryan- Baxter
Over the past few weeks I have done presentations on Bluemix at two ICS user groups, MWLUG and ICONUK. I did pretty much the same presentation at both mainly focused on introducing developers to Bluemix. Obviously, since these user groups are focused mainly around ICS, there is interest in how Domino and XPages fits into the Bluemix story. Well as of right now you cannot deploy your XPages apps to Bluemix. However, Kramer Reeves announced at MWLUG that ICS is investigating how to make th |
7
|
Achieving The Elusive Hybrid Cloud With Bluemix
Thu, Aug 28th 2014 6:12a Ryan- Baxter
Public clouds are great. They offer great elasticity and cost savings, and in the case of a PaaS like Bluemix, allows us (developers) to forget about maintaining any infrastructure and focus in on our code. However we all realize that public cloud can’t be used for everything. There are some applications and services that must remain in our own data centers on private networks. The reasons why vary, maybe it is too much work to move the resource to the cloud, or maybe the data in t |
2
|
Bluemix Session At MWLUG
Mon, Aug 25th 2014 10:12a Ryan- Baxter
Tomorrow I will be heading out to Grand Rapid MI to attend and speak at MWLUG (Midwest Lotus User Group). If you are attending and would like to learn more about Bluemix, IBM’s new platform for deploying applications to the cloud, be sure to stop by my session at 11AM on Thursday.
Achieving Developer Nirvana With Codename BlueMix
BlueMix is a platform for composing and running virtually any application in the cloud without having to worry about the hardware, software, and networking nee |
2
|
Upcoming Bluemix Days For My Canadian Friends
Wed, Aug 20th 2014 6:12p Ryan- Baxter
If you live “north of the border” (to me anyways) there are a number of Bluemix Days that are coming up that you might be interested in attending. This is a great opportunity to learn more about Bluemix and get started building your first app. See the below flyer for more details and dates. |
4
|
Webinar: Building Highly Scalable Applications With Bluemix
Mon, Aug 11th 2014 8:12a Ryan- Baxter
The elasticity of the cloud is a huge selling point for most developers when considering where to deploy their applications. The ability to add and remove instances of your application based on the load against it saves you a lot of time and money. However you can’t just deploy any application to the cloud and expect it will behave properly when scaled horizontally. In fact, if you didn’t think about scalability when building your application chances are your application will b |
2
|
Replay of the Bluemix Virtual Meetup on Mobile Services
Wed, Jul 23rd 2014 11:12a Ryan- Baxter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jut0gHtAhgk |
1
|
Watch Today’s Bluemix Virtual Meetup Live On YouTube
Wed, Jul 23rd 2014 7:12a Ryan- Baxter
You can watch today’s Bluemix Virtual Meetup on mobile cloud services live at 10 AM EST on YouTube. There are 3 options for watching.
Watch out on the YouTube page.
Watch on the Google+ page. If you watch on Google+ you will be able to ask questions.
Watch right here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jut0gHtAhgk |
10
|
Build a REST API For Your IoT Data Using MongoDB, Node-RED, and Bluemix
Mon, Jul 21st 2014 8:16a Ryan- Baxter
In my previous post I talked about how to use the IBM IoT Cloud and Bluemix to build apps based on data coming from an TI Sensor Tag. One of the apps I showed was Node-RED, however it was ver basic in that it only printed the data to a debug node. In this video I show you how you can store that data in a MongoDB and create a REST API for the data all in Node-RED without writing any code! Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBZagavmxY |
6
|
Bluemix ToDo App Updates
Fri, Jul 18th 2014 10:15a Ryan- Baxter
The ToDo apps for Bluemix was one of the first sample projects I published after becoming a developer advocate for Bluemix. Even though the apps are simple, I still think they are some of the most meaningful samples we have. Today I have made them even better Since Bluemix went GA we introduced the MongoLab service and an enhanced Cloudant service. I have decided to change the ToDo apps so they take advantage of both of these new services.
Why change something that is already good? T |
7
|
Bluemix and the Internet of Things
Wed, Jul 16th 2014 10:11a Ryan- Baxter
Want to take a guess as to how many devices will be connected to the internet by the end of 2015? Give up? 15 billion. Yup ,that’s right, that is 15 followed by 9 zeros. By 2020 that number will increase to 40 billion!
All of these devices make up what is called the internet of things. As you might imagine with the number of devices growing there have been a number of new technologies emerging that help developers connect and use the data comming from these devices. One of the |
1
|
Bluemix Virtual Meetup – Mobile Cloud Services
Mon, Jun 30th 2014 8:11a Ryan- Baxter
We have scheduled our next Bluemix virtual meetup for July 23rd at 10 AM EST. We will again be using Google Hangouts (hopefully without the audio problems this time). For this meetup we will be focusing on the mobile cloud services in Bluemix, there will be plenty of information and demos to help you get started. At the last virtual meetup we had a lot of questions on mobile so I figured this would be a good topic. You can download this .ics file to add the event to your calendar and be |
2
|
Using Custom Domain Names In Bluemix
Mon, Jun 23rd 2014 6:12a Ryan- Baxter
One of the more common questions I get about using Bluemix is “How do I use my own domain names for my apps in Bluemix?”. Bluemix allows you to bind multiple routes to any given application so in addition to the mybluemix.net route your application has you can bind any number of other routes as well whether they use the mybluemix.net domain name or your own domain name. Here is a short video of how you can use your own domain names in your application routes.
http://www.youtube.c |
3
|
Using The Mobile Data Service In Bluemix
Thu, Jun 19th 2014 8:14a Ryan- Baxter
I have stated to look at the mobile services that are within Bluemix and experiment with how developers can use them in their mobile apps. I decided to start with the Mobile Data service. This service provides SDKs for iOS and Android (as well as ones for Node.js and client-side Javascript) which allow you to perform basic CRUD operations from your mobile app. However before I got started playing with the Mobile Data service I needed a mobile app to experiment with. Since I am an Apple u |
2
|
Access Service Info With Spring Cloud
Wed, Jun 4th 2014 9:15a Ryan- Baxter
Adding services to your application to integrate additional functionality is one of the primary benefits of using a PaaS like Bluemix. Whether that is a database, a mobile push service, or some type of analytics service, you just pick what you need and bind them to your application. You don’t have to install software of setup VMs, just point and click. After you have done that you are always faced with the same problem, you now need to access the service info in the VCAP_SERVICES env |
1
|
Bluemix YouTube Playlist!!!
Mon, Jun 2nd 2014 8:15a Ryan- Baxter
I have created a Bluemix YouTube playlist and I have been adding videos related to Bluemix as I come across them. There are 32 videos in the playlist as of this post and I am sure that number will grow over time. If you have videos you would like to me add let me know. |
7
|
Article On How To Build The BlueChatter App In Node.js
Tue, May 27th 2014 4:11p Ryan- Baxter
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post on a sample app I built in Node.js called BlueChatter. At a high level the app is an IRC or chat like client. However, that is not the main purpose of the app. The real purpose of the app is to show how you can write apps that are scalable in BlueMix. I have also now detailed the process of how I constructed this application in an article on developerWorks. It takes you through writing the initial implementation, deploying it to BlueMix, and then cha |
2
|
First Impressions Of BlueMix
Fri, May 23rd 2014 7:12a Ryan- Baxter
Over the past few months IBM has been holding what it calls “200 Days Of BlueMix“. These are essentially workshops where IBM introduces users to BlueMix and gives them the opportunity to work side by side with IBM engineers to get started building apps on the platform. There have been a couple of videos that have come out of these events with some users sharing their initial thoughts about BlueMix and how they think it can help them change the way they are building applications. |
2
|
Replay Of Yesterday’s BlueMix Virtual Meetup Now Available!!!
Thu, May 22nd 2014 9:11a Ryan- Baxter
If you were not able to attend yesterday’s BlueMix Virtual Meetup, the replay is now available on YouTube. Thankfully the demo gods were with me yesterday and I was able to successfully complete a live demo of adding a service, updating the code, and pushing back to BlueMix! Unfortunately the audio was a little choppy at points, not sure why. I will probably give Hangouts one more shot, maybe it was a one time thing but if it happens again I will look into other ways of hosting the v |
3
|
BlueMix Virtual Meetup Tomorrow!!!
Tue, May 20th 2014 8:11a Ryan- Baxter
We are now about 24 hours away from tomorrows BlueMix Virtual Meetup. This being our first meetup, the content will mainly be introductory and if the demo gods are with us we should have some live demos as well (with real live coding!!!). I had some trouble using Google+ events, I did not realize that an On Air Event is different than a normal event with a hangout. Oh well, it shouldn’t cause too much confusion. You can find the on air broadcast event here, or if you prefer you can |
3
|
Agenda For Next Weeks Virtual BlueMix Meetup
Tue, May 13th 2014 9:11a Ryan- Baxter
We are now a week away from next weeks virtual BlueMix Meetup. Next weeks event will be mostly technical and targeting developers looking to get started building apps with BlueMix. We will cover the a wide range of topics in enough detail that you should feel confident enough to push your first app after we are done. If you can’t make it, there will a recording of the meetup that will be available after the meetup is over. I will also make the slides available on SlideShare. I l |
8
|
BlueMix Sample: ToDo Apps Built Using Your Favorite Language
Thu, May 1st 2014 10:12a Ryan- Baxter
The ToDo app is one of the most popular samples to build when learning new languages and frameworks. Only the Hello World sample is more popular. While Hello World makes you feel accomplished, it generally leaves you with more questions than answers. To really understand how things are working you need to build something a little more complex.
Enter the ToDo app. When I joined the team of BlueMix dev advocates one of the first discussions we had was around which sample apps we wanted to |
6
|
BlueMix / Cloud Foundry Manifest Generator
Wed, Apr 30th 2014 10:12a Ryan- Baxter
Using manifests when deploying your applications to BlueMix or any Cloud Foundry deployment makes your deployments simple and consistent. They are a requirement for using the deployment features in the IBM Dev Ops services but have many benefits even when doing development locally. If you have very robust cf push commands it is much simpler to put all the parameters in a manifest so you don’t have to type them out each time. The problem is that for newbies and people who are not fami |
3
|
BlueMix Virtual Meetup – May 21st
Tue, Apr 22nd 2014 12:12p Ryan- Baxter
As some of you are aware IBM has been creating a large number of local meetups around BlueMix. I know that not everyone can attend these for one reason or another so I thought why not try to have a virtual BlueMix Meetup? Our first virtual meetup will be on May 21st at 10 AM EST. We will be using Google Hangouts and the recording will be available on YouTube if you can’t make it. For this first meetup event your presenter will be yours truly and I will be giving an introduction to |
5
|
BlueChatter: A Sample App For BlueMix
Tue, Apr 22nd 2014 8:12a Ryan- Baxter
Yesterday I published a new sample application to our Codename: BlueMix organization on GitHub called BlueChatter. BlueChatter is a chat / IRC-like application for your browser. You enter a user name and then you can send messages. If someone else is also using the app they will instantly see whatever messages you send. Obviously this is not going to replace Skype or your favorite IRC client, instead it is meant to demonstrate how to scale your application in BlueMix.
BlueChatter uses l |
4
|
DevOps Services For BlueMix
Mon, Apr 21st 2014 7:11a Ryan- Baxter
You may have noticed the JazzHub DevOps service in the BlueMix catalog as you have been poking around. If you have not played around with it yet I suggest you get to it!
IBM DevOps Services is a place where you can collaborate with others to develop, track, plan and deploy software.
Using the auto-deploy feature in JazzHub you can easily deploy your project to BlueMix on every commit, in other words it allows you to practice continuous integration and delivery. It takes about 1 minute to ena |
2
|
Slides From Boston Cloud Meetup
Tue, Apr 15th 2014 1:14p Ryan- Baxter
I was supposed to present last Monday at the Boston Cloud Meetup on Cloud Foundry but my daughter was born the day before so I missed it. One of my colleagues stepped in and did the presentation for me but I figured I would share the slides with everyone anyways. |
1
|
Heartbleed And PaaSes
Mon, Apr 14th 2014 9:11a Ryan- Baxter
I am sure everyone has heard about the Heartbleed bug by now. If you haven’t, where have you been? Even the Today show was talking about it
The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, ins |
2
|
You Choose The Runtime On BlueMix!!!
Thu, Apr 3rd 2014 8:11a Ryan- Baxter
As most of you know, you can deploy an app that uses virtually any runtime to BlueMix. As long as there is a buildpack for the runtime, your app will run on BlueMix. Of course knowing the ins and outs of using the buildpack for your runtime can be a little tricky sometimes. That is why over the past few weeks I have been working on implementing a ToDo application in Java, Node, Sinatra, Python, and PHP. This idea was inspired by todomvc.com which is dedicated to showing developers how to |
3
|
Diving Into PHP and BlueMix
Mon, Mar 31st 2014 7:14a Ryan- Baxter
This past week I have been working on writing an app in PHP and getting it deployed on BlueMix. The first thing I did before I started was take a look at the buildpacks that were available. Last week I made the mistake of picking one without trying it first and wasted a huge amount of time trying to figure out what was wrong with my app when it ended up being a problem with the buildpack. This time I decided I would put in a little effort into seeing which ones worked first. Browsing the |
2
|
Using BlueMix To Find Qualified Candidates
Mon, Mar 24th 2014 12:12p Ryan- Baxter
My colleague David Barnes has created a new video demonstrating BlueMix. In this video he walks through a scenario where an HR departments wants to build an app to help find candidates for a job using LinkedIn. Check it out below. If you want to know some of the nitty gritty details about how deploying an app works check out my blog post on how to deploy a Java app to BlueMix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR_jDitw0Sc |
6
|
Pushing A Java App To BlueMix
Mon, Mar 24th 2014 7:11a Ryan- Baxter
In my previous video I took you through a tour of the BlueMix UI, but we didn’t actually go through pushing an application up to BlueMix and seeing the results. Well no fear, I have created videos for that as well. I actually split this up into two videos. In the first one we create a Java app in the BlueMix UI, download the code for the app, make some changes, and then push it back to BlueMix. In part two we learn about scaling our Java app and how to take advantage of the service |
11
|
Deploying A Python App To BlueMix
Tue, Mar 18th 2014 8:12a Ryan- Baxter
For the past 2 days I have been trying to get a very simple Python app deployed and running on BlueMix. This proved to be a little challenging because there were no clear cut instructions or simple examples to go by (that I could find at first), and I had never written any Python before. After spending most of the day yesterday talking to some expert IBMers I eventually got a simple hello world Python app using Flask deployed to BlueMix. Later on, I came across this project on GitHub which |
2
|
An Introduction To The BlueMix UI
Wed, Mar 12th 2014 8:11a Ryan- Baxter
One of first things everyone will do once they get access to the open beta of BlueMix is explore what they can do in the UI. Here is a 15 minute, introduction to the UI of BlueMix to show you what its all about. Hopefully you learn about something you didn’t know you could do. If you haven’t signed up for the open beta I encourage you to do so, IT IS FREE! Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_-exOUGmyw |
1
|
BlueMix Demo App From IBM Pulse
Mon, Mar 10th 2014 11:15a Ryan- Baxter
A few days ago IBM published a video of the demo app build ontop of BlueMix shown during the OGS at IBM Pulse. You can find the video on YouTube or check it out below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOqmR2nSCHY
Tweetgovernment,politics news,politics news,politics |
4
|
Using Custom Domains On BlueMix
Mon, Mar 10th 2014 10:12a Ryan- Baxter
Over the weekend there were two questions posted to the BlueMix forum about using custom domains with apps deployed to BlueMix. (Both questions were posted by the same person.) Excellent question! In fact it is pretty easy to do, it basically involves telling BlueMix about your domain name and then creating a CNAME record pointing towards app.ng.bluemix.net. See the answers to the forum questions for the details.
Post 1
Post 2
Tweetgovernment,politics news,politics news,politics |
5
|
Getting A List Of All Services On BlueMix
Wed, Mar 5th 2014 8:15a Ryan- Baxter
One of the best features of Cloud Foundry and BlueMix is the services available for developers to integrate into their apps. The first step in using any of these services is creating them. You can create them in various ways, through the BlueMix UI, with the command line, with the Cloud Foundry Maven plugin, and with a manifest.yml file. In almost every situation where you are creating the service you need will need to know the name and the plan. Up until know I have been figuring out th |
3
|
LinkedIn Group For BlueMix Enthusiasts
Tue, Mar 4th 2014 8:14a Ryan- Baxter
If you are looking for a place to discuss all things BlueMix please join the BlueMix Enthusiasts group on LinkedIn.
Tweetgovernment,politics news,politics news,politics |
6
|
MyMenu Runs On BlueMix
Mon, Mar 3rd 2014 11:14a Ryan- Baxter
MyMenu won the app dev throwdown held at IBM Pulse last week. They created an app that incorporated mobile and analytics and runs on BlueMix and Softlayer. Here is the marketing video they put together describing the app and how they built it.
MyMenu – Pulse2014 AppThrowDown from MyMenu on Vimeo.
Tweetgovernment,politics news,politics news,politics |
7
|
Moving An Existing Node.js App To Run On BlueMix
Mon, Mar 3rd 2014 8:19a Ryan- Baxter
Over the past few weeks I have been teaching myself about Node.js. One of the tutorials I followed was a step by step guide to getting up and running with Node.js, Express, Jade, and MongoDB. After I finished the tutorial and had the app running locally I wanted to get it deployed in the cloud on BlueMix, so I began to investigate what I had to modify in order to do this. After reviewing the code one thing jumped out to me the I knew immediately would be a problem. Want to take a guess a |
