https://jamesthom.as/ Recent content on notes on software. Hugo -- gohugo.io en Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:56:24 +0100 https://jamesthom.as/2022/10/password-protection-for-static-websites-on-aws-s3/ Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:56:24 +0100 https://jamesthom.as/2022/10/password-protection-for-static-websites-on-aws-s3/ I recently needed to share a static website with a third-party and secure the content against access by unauthorised users. The website should only be viewable with a username and password. Website files were static content - so could be served from a CDN-like service. All content must be served over HTTPS on a custom domain. Here’s how I accomplished this on AWS… AWS’s object store (S3) supports serving static web content directly from user buckets. https://jamesthom.as/2022/05/ai-powered-speed-camera/ Tue, 31 May 2022 13:56:24 +0100 https://jamesthom.as/2022/05/ai-powered-speed-camera/ Do you want to detect speeding cars without having an expensive radar gun? 🚗📸 Me too - which is why I built an AI-powered virtual speed camera. It processes video footage of a road to detect cars using an AI model and calculates their speeds. An annotated video file is produced (with the car speeds overlaid on the cars) as well as a spreadsheet with the full statistics. This project turns any webcam or camera phone into a virtual speed camera. https://jamesthom.as/2021/06/lessons-learnt-in-developer-relations/ Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:33:17 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2021/06/lessons-learnt-in-developer-relations/ These are the lessons I’ve learnt about Developer Relations, after over five years working as a Developer Advocate. They are based upon my own personal experiences and those of other advocates I’ve spoken to. I’ve seen advocates encounter the same challenges at different companies across the industry. I hope others can learn from my experiences, rather than repeating my mistakes! background I worked as a Developer Advocate for IBM Cloud from 2014 to 2020. https://jamesthom.as/2021/05/setting-up-esbuild-for-typescript-libraries/ Mon, 17 May 2021 21:40:21 +0100 https://jamesthom.as/2021/05/setting-up-esbuild-for-typescript-libraries/ esbuild is a new build tool for JavaScript that claims to be 10-100x faster than similar projects (webpack, rollup, etc). I’ve started using it for TypeScript development and have been amazed by the performance. TypeScript compilation is instantaneous compared to the native TypeScript compiler. This a huge benefit for my developer productivity! As well as being extremely fast, esbuild is simple to setup & use, aims to work out of the box and handles all the common build tasks (bundling, minification, generating source maps, etc) needed for most projects. https://jamesthom.as/2021/02/aws-s3-iam-errors-with-missing-files-404-expected-403-returned/ Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:11:36 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2021/02/aws-s3-iam-errors-with-missing-files-404-expected-403-returned/ “Why is AWS S3 returning authorisation errors (HTTP 403 responses) for bucket files that don’t exist (rather than HTTP 404 responses)? The IAM role has the correct permissions (s3:GetObject). If the bucket file is available - the content is returned as normal. This makes no sense, what is going on…” 🙇‍♂️ This was me a few weeks ago. After losing too many hours debugging this issue (with no success), I reached out to Ant Stanley to check what I was missing. https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/generating-serverless-pdfs-with-aws-lambda-pdfkit/ Mon, 25 Jan 2021 17:33:17 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/generating-serverless-pdfs-with-aws-lambda-pdfkit/ How can you return dynamically generated PDF documents as HTTP responses from serverless functions? I recently had this exact use-case on a client project. Custom PDFs needed to be created in real-time with dynamic content from an internal data source. PDFs would be accessed via a HTML link from an internal web-app. API responses had to include the document’s binary contents directly, rather than forwarding to an external storage service. https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/debugging-github-actions/ Sun, 17 Jan 2021 15:37:08 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/debugging-github-actions/ I’ve been using Github Actions to create CI/CD pipelines for a new project. In the process of setting it up, I ran into an issue familiar to anyone who’s worked with CI/CD systems before: builds failing due to missing external dependencies in the virtual environment used by the CI/CD system. The project had some complex application dependencies that I need to replicate from the local development environment (OS X) into the build environment (Ubuntu). https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/virtual-serial-ports-using-socat/ Fri, 08 Jan 2021 16:54:43 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2021/01/virtual-serial-ports-using-socat/ How can you test and debug programs using serial port communication when you don’t have access to a physical serial port? Using the socat utility to create virtual serial ports which pipe port traffic to custom executables using stdin/stdout. Here is the magic command you need: socat -d -d -v pty,rawer,link=<PORT_NAME> EXEC:<COMMAND>,pty,rawer It took me a while to find the correct combination of options to make this work. Here’s what I’ve used… https://jamesthom.as/2019/08/faster-file-transfers-with-serverless/ Wed, 28 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/08/faster-file-transfers-with-serverless/ This week I’ve been helping a client speed up file transfers between cloud object stores using serverless. They had a 120GB file on a cloud provider’s object store. This needed copying into a different cloud object store for integration with platform services. Their current file transfer process was to download the file locally and then re-upload using a development machine. This was taking close to three hours due to bandwidth issues. https://jamesthom.as/2019/08/serverless-functions-with-webassembly-modules/ Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/08/serverless-functions-with-webassembly-modules/ Watching a recent talk by Lin Clark and Till Schneidereit about WebAssembly (Wasm) inspired me to start experimenting with using WebAssembly modules from serverless functions. This blog post demonstrates how to invoke functions written in C from Node.js serverless functions. Source code in C is compiled to Wasm modules and bundled in the deployment package. Node.js code implements the serverless platform handler and calls native functions upon invocations. The examples should work (with some modifications) on any serverless platform that supports deploying Node. https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/hosting-static-websites-on-ibm-cloud/ Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/hosting-static-websites-on-ibm-cloud/ This blog post explains how to host a static website on IBM Cloud. These websites are rendered client-side by the browser from static assets, like HTML, CSS and JS files. They do not need a server-side component to create pages dynamically at runtime. Static websites are often combined with backend APIs to create Single Page Applications. Hosting static websites on IBM Cloud uses Cloud Object Storage (COS) and Cloud Internet Services (CIS) (with Page Rules and Edge Functions). https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/connecting-to-ibm-cloud-databases-for-redis-from-node.js/ Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/connecting-to-ibm-cloud-databases-for-redis-from-node.js/ This blog post explains how to connect to an IBM Cloud Databases for Redis instance from a Node.js application. There is a (small) difference between the connection details needed for an IBM Cloud Databases for Redis instance compared to a local instance of the open-source database. This is due to all IBM Cloud Databases using secured TLS connections with self-signed certificates. I keep running into this issue (and forgetting how to fix it 🤦‍♂️*), so I’m documenting the solution here to help myself (and others) who might run into it…* 🦸‍♂️ https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/serverless-apis-for-max-models/ Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/07/serverless-apis-for-max-models/ IBM’s Model Asset eXchange provides a curated list of free Machine Learning models for developers. Models currently published include detecting emotions or ages in faces from images, forecasting the weather, converting speech to text and more. Models are pre-trained and ready for use in the cloud. Models are published as series of public Docker images. Images automatically expose a HTTP API for model predictions. Documentation in the model repositories explains how to run images locally (using Docker) or deploy to the cloud (using Kubernetes). https://jamesthom.as/2019/05/accessing-long-running-apache-openwhisk-actions-results/ Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/05/accessing-long-running-apache-openwhisk-actions-results/ Apache OpenWhisk actions are invoked by sending HTTP POST requests to the platform API. Invocation requests have two different modes: blocking and non-blocking. Blocking invocations mean the platform won’t send the HTTP response until the action finishes. This allows it to include the action result in the response. Blocking invocations are used when you want to invoke an action and wait for the result. $ wsk action invoke my_action --blocking ok: invoked /_/my_action with id db70ef682fae4f8fb0ef682fae2f8fd5 { "activationId": "db70ef682fae4f8fb0ef682fae2f8fd5", . https://jamesthom.as/2019/05/saving-money-and-time-with-node.js-worker-threads-in-serverless-functions/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/05/saving-money-and-time-with-node.js-worker-threads-in-serverless-functions/ Node.js v12 was released last month. This new version includes support for Worker Threads, that are enabled by default. Node.js Worker Threads make it simple to execute JavaScript code in parallel using threads. 👏👏👏 This is useful for Node.js applications with CPU-intensive workloads. Using Worker Threads, JavaScript code can be executed code concurrently using multiple CPU cores. This reduces execution time compared to a non-Worker Threads version. If serverless platforms provide Node. https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/apache-openwhisk-web-action-http-proxy/ Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/apache-openwhisk-web-action-http-proxy/ What if you could take an existing web application and run it on a serverless platform with no changes? 🤔 Lots of existing (simple) stateless web applications are perfect candidates for serverless, but use web frameworks that don’t know how to integrate with those platforms. People have started to develop a number of custom plugins for those frameworks to try and bridge this gap. These plugins can provide an easier learning curve for developers new to serverless. https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/serverless-ci/cd-with-travis-ci-serverless-framework-and-ibm-cloud-functions/ Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/serverless-ci/cd-with-travis-ci-serverless-framework-and-ibm-cloud-functions/ How do you set up a CI/CD pipeline for serverless applications? This blog post will explain how to use Travis CI, The Serverless Framework and the AVA testing framework to set up a fully-automated build, deploy and test pipeline for a serverless application. It will use a real example of a production serverless application, built using Apache OpenWhisk and running on IBM Cloud Functions. The CI/CD pipeline will execute the following tasks… https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/automating-apache-openwhisk-releases-with-serverless/ Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/04/automating-apache-openwhisk-releases-with-serverless/ This blog post explains how I used serverless functions to automate release candidate verification for the Apache OpenWhisk project. Automating this process has the following benefits… Removes the chance of human errors compared to the previously manual validation process. Allows me to validate new releases without access to my dev machine. Usable by all committers by hosting as an external serverless web app. Automating release candidate validation makes it easier for project committers to participate in release voting. https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/openwhisk-web-action-errors-with-sequences/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/openwhisk-web-action-errors-with-sequences/ This week, I came across an interesting problem when building HTTP APIs on IBM Cloud Functions. How can Apache OpenWhisk Web Actions, implemented using action sequences, handle application errors that need the sequence to stop processing and a custom HTTP response to be returned? This came from wanting to add custom HTTP authentication to existing Web Actions. I had decided to enhance existing Web Actions with authentication using action sequences. https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/pluggable-event-providers-for-apache-openwhisk/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/pluggable-event-providers-for-apache-openwhisk/ Recently I presented my work building “pluggable event providers” for Apache OpenWhisk to the open-source community on the bi-weekly video meeting. This was based on my experience building a new event provider for Apache OpenWhisk, which led me to prototype an easier way to add event sources to platform whilst cutting down on the boilerplate code required. Slides from the talk are here and there’s also a video recording available. https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/couchdb-filters-with-openwhisk-triggers/ Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/couchdb-filters-with-openwhisk-triggers/ Imagine you have an OpenWhisk action to send emails to users to verify their email addresses. User profiles, containing email addresses and verification statuses, are maintained in a CouchDB database. { ... "email": { "address": "user@host.com", "status": "unverified" } } Setting up a CouchDB trigger feed allows the email action to be invoked when the user profile changes. When user profiles have unverified email addresses, the action can send verification emails. https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/large-java-applications-on-apache-openwhisk/ Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/02/large-java-applications-on-apache-openwhisk/ This blog post will explain how to run large Java applications on Apache OpenWhisk. Java actions are deployed from JAR files containing application class files. External libraries can be used by bundling those dependencies into a fat JAR file. The JAR file must be less than the maximum action size of 48MB. So, what if the application uses lots of external libraries and the JAR file is larger than 48MB? https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/provisioning-ibm-cloud-services-with-terraform/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/provisioning-ibm-cloud-services-with-terraform/ This blog post will teach you how to provision applications services on IBM Cloud with Terraform. Terraform is an open-source “infrastructure-as-code” tool. It allows cloud resources to be defined using a declarative configuration file. The Terraform CLI then uses this file to automatically provision and maintain cloud infrastructure needed by your application. This allows the creation of reproducible environments in the cloud across your application life cycle. IBM Cloud created an official provider plugin for Terraform. https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/loosely-coupled-serverless-functions-with-apache-openwhisk/ Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/loosely-coupled-serverless-functions-with-apache-openwhisk/ Just like software engineering, best practices for serverless applications advise keeping functions small and focused on a single task, aka “do one thing and do it well”. Small single-purpose functions are easier to develop, test and debug. 👍 But what happens when you need execute multiple asynchronous tasks (implemented as separate functions) from an incoming event, like an API request? 🤔 Functions Calling Functions? Functions can invoke other functions directly, using asynchronous calls through the client SDK. https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/highly-available-serverless-apps-with-cloudants-cross-region-replication/ Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2019/01/highly-available-serverless-apps-with-cloudants-cross-region-replication/ Building highly available serverless applications relies on eliminating “single points of failure” from application architectures. Existing tutorials showed how to deploy the same serverless application on IBM Cloud in different regions. Using the Global Load Balancer from IBM Cloud Internet Services, traffic is distributed across multiple applications from the same hostname. The Global Load Balancer automatically detects outages in the regional applications and redirects traffics as necessary. But what if all instances rely on the same database service and that has issues? https://jamesthom.as/2018/12/using-custom-domains-with-ibm-cloud-functions/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/12/using-custom-domains-with-ibm-cloud-functions/ In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use a custom domain for serverless functions exposed as APIs on IBM Cloud. APIs endpoints use a random sub-domain on IBM Cloud by default. Importing your own domains means endpoints can be accessible through custom URLs. Registering a custom domain with IBM Cloud needs you to complete the following steps… Generate SSL/TLS certificates for your domain Register domain certificates with IBM Certificate Manager Bind a custom domain to Cloud Functions APIs using the IBM Cloud APIs console. https://jamesthom.as/2018/10/finding-photos-on-twitter-using-face-recognition-with-tensorflow.js/ Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/10/finding-photos-on-twitter-using-face-recognition-with-tensorflow.js/ As a developer advocate, I spend a lot of time at developer conferences (talking about serverless 😎). Upon returning from each trip, I need to compile a “trip report” on the event for my bosses. This helps demonstrate the value in attending events and that I’m not just accruing air miles and hotel points for fun… 🛫🏨 I always include any social media content people post about my talks in the trip report. https://jamesthom.as/2018/08/serverless-machine-learning-with-tensorflow.js/ Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/08/serverless-machine-learning-with-tensorflow.js/ In a previous blog post, I showed how to use TensorFlow.js on Node.js to run visual recognition on images from the local filesystem. TensorFlow.js is a JavaScript version of the open-source machine learning library from Google. Once I had this working with a local Node.js script, my next idea was to convert it into a serverless function. Running this function on IBM Cloud Functions (Apache OpenWhisk) would turn the script into my own visual recognition microservice. https://jamesthom.as/2018/08/machine-learning-in-node.js-with-tensorflow.js/ Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/08/machine-learning-in-node.js-with-tensorflow.js/ TensorFlow.js is a new version of the popular open-source library which brings deep learning to JavaScript. Developers can now define, train, and run machine learning models using the high-level library API. Pre-trained models mean developers can now easily perform complex tasks like visual recognition, generating music or detecting human poses with just a few lines of JavaScript. Having started as a front-end library for web browsers, recent updates added experimental support for Node. https://jamesthom.as/2018/07/monitoring-dashboards-with-kibana-for-ibm-cloud-functions/ Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/07/monitoring-dashboards-with-kibana-for-ibm-cloud-functions/ Following all the events from the World Cup can be hard. So many matches, so many goals. Rather than manually refreshing BBC Football to check the scores, I decided to created a Twitter bot that would automatically tweet out each goal. The Twitter bot runs on IBM Cloud Functions. It is called once a minute to check for new goals, using the alarm trigger feed. If new goals have been scored, it calls another action to send the tweet messages. https://jamesthom.as/2018/07/debugging-node.js-openwhisk-actions/ Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/07/debugging-node.js-openwhisk-actions/ Debugging serverless applications is one of the most challenging issues developers face when using serverless platforms. How can you use debugging tools without any access to the runtime environment? Last week, I worked out how to expose the Node.js debugger in the Docker environment used for the application runtime in Apache OpenWhisk. Want to use Node.js debugger for @openwhisk actions? Start runtime container locally with this command to expose v8 inspector. https://jamesthom.as/2018/06/binding-iam-services-to-ibm-cloud-functions/ Tue, 05 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/06/binding-iam-services-to-ibm-cloud-functions/ Binding service credentials to actions and packages is a much better approach to handling authentication credentials in IBM Cloud Functions, than manually updating (and maintaining) default parameters 🔐. IBM Cloud Functions supports binding credentials from IAM-based and Cloud Foundry provisioned services. Documentation and blog posts demonstrating service binding focuses on traditional platform services, created using the Cloud Foundry service broker. As IBM Cloud integrates IAM across the platform, more platform services will migrate to use the IAM service for managing authentication credentials. https://jamesthom.as/2018/05/using-cloud-object-storage-from-ibm-cloud-functions-node.js/ Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/05/using-cloud-object-storage-from-ibm-cloud-functions-node.js/ How do you manage files for a serverless application? 🤔 Previous blog posts discussed this common problem and introduced the most popular solution, using a cloud-based object storage service. 👏👏👏 Object stores provide elastic storage in the cloud, with a billing model which charges for capacity used. These services are the storage solution for serverless applications, which do not have access to a traditional file system. 👍 I’m now going to demonstrate how to use IBM Cloud Object Storage from IBM Cloud Functions. https://jamesthom.as/2018/04/file-storage-for-serverless-applications/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/04/file-storage-for-serverless-applications/ “Where do you store files without a server?" …is the most common question I get asked during Q&A after one of my “Introduction to Serverless Platforms” conference talks. Searching for this question online, this is the answer you will often find. “Use an object store for file storage and access using the S3-compatible interface. Provide direct access to files by making buckets public and return pre-signed URLs for uploading content. https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/configuring-alert-notifications-using-serverless-metrics/ Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/configuring-alert-notifications-using-serverless-metrics/ This blog post is the final part of a series on “Monitoring Serverless Applications Metrics”. See the introduction post for details and links to other posts. In previous blog posts, we showed how to capture serverless metrics from IBM Cloud Functions, send those values into the IBM Cloud Monitoring service and build visualisation dashboards using Grafana. Dashboards are a great way to monitor metrics but rely on someone watching them! We need a way to be alerted to issues without having to manually review dashboards. https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/lessons-from-west-berkshire-action-for-refugees/ Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/lessons-from-west-berkshire-action-for-refugees/ For the past two years, I’ve been involved with a local charity (West Berkshire Action For Refugees) set up in response to the refugee crisis. Started with the aim to send a single collection of aid to refugees in Calais, the group ended up sending thousands of boxes of aid to refugees all over Europe. Campaigning for West Berkshire Council to participate in the UK’s resettlement scheme for Syrian refugees also led to multiple refugee families being resettled locally. https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/starting-openwhisk-in-sixty-seconds/ Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/starting-openwhisk-in-sixty-seconds/ Apache OpenWhisk is an open-source serverless platform. Developers can use hosted instances from IBM, deploy to any infrastructure provider and even run it locally. Developers often use a local instance of the platform during development. Deploying to a local instance is faster than the cloud. It also provides access runtime environments to debug issues and allows development without an Internet connection. Production applications are still run on IBM Cloud Functions. https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/visualising-serverless-metrics-with-grafana-dashboards/ Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2018/01/visualising-serverless-metrics-with-grafana-dashboards/ This blog post is part three of a series on “Monitoring Serverless Applications Metrics”. See the introduction post for details and links to other posts. Having configured collecting serverless metrics from IBM Cloud Functions (Apache OpenWhisk) applications, monitoring incoming metric values will alert us to problems. IBM Cloud Monitoring provides a Grafana-based service to help with this. Grafana is an open source metric analytics & visualization suite. It is most commonly used for visualizing time series data for infrastructure and application analytics. https://jamesthom.as/2017/12/capturing-runtime-metrics-for-openwhisk-applications/ Mon, 18 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/12/capturing-runtime-metrics-for-openwhisk-applications/ This blog post is part one of a series on “Monitoring Serverless Applications Metrics”. See the introduction post for details and links to other posts. Serverless platforms pose a unique challenge for collecting application metrics. Runtime environments are ephemeral, existing only to process requests. Using a background process to capture and export metrics to an external service is impossible. With such a restricted runtime environment, we have to look at other options… 🤔 https://jamesthom.as/2017/12/monitoring-serverless-applications-metrics/ Fri, 15 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/12/monitoring-serverless-applications-metrics/ Serverless applications are not “No Ops”, despite the meme. 🙄 Monitoring runtime metrics is still crucial for serverless applications. Identifying, diagnosing and resolving issues in production requires data on execution durations, errors thrown, resource usage statistics amongst other metrics. IBM Cloud has a comprehensive series of tools for monitoring application metrics. In this blog post series, we’re going to look at using these tools to monitor metrics from serverless applications. 💯💯💯 https://jamesthom.as/2017/11/openwhisk-logstash-forwarder/ Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/11/openwhisk-logstash-forwarder/ Debugging serverless applications in production is often reliant on application logs, due to having no access to the runtime environment. No SSHing into the machine and attaching a debugger to a process or using strace to dump system calls. Storing, searching and analysing serverless application logs is crucial to diagnosing and fixing bugs on serverless platforms. The “ELK Stack” has become a popular solution for managing applications logs. Combining three open-source projects (ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana), this solution provides a scalable platform for importing, storing and searching application logs. https://jamesthom.as/2017/10/advanced-openwhisk-alarm-schedules/ Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/10/advanced-openwhisk-alarm-schedules/ Apache OpenWhisk supports a cron-based alarm package for invoking serverless functions on a fixed schedule, e.g. every 5 minutes, every day at 5PM, once a week. Scheduled events allow functions to be invoked for background processes or batch operations, like processing logs generated in the past 24 hours. Using a cron-based schedule pattern, running functions once a minute, every two hours or 5pm on Mondays is simple, but what about more complex schedule patterns? https://jamesthom.as/2017/08/large-applications-on-openwhisk/ Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/08/large-applications-on-openwhisk/ OpenWhisk supports creating actions from archive files containing source files and project dependencies. The maximum code size for the action is 48MB. OpenWhisk system details, https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/docs/reference.md#per-action-artifact-mb-fixed-48mb Applications with lots of third-party modules, native libraries or external tools may be soon find themselves running into this limit. Node.js libraries are notorious for having large amounts of dependencies. What if you need to deploy an application larger than this limit to OpenWhisk? https://jamesthom.as/2017/07/creating-swift-binaries-for-openwhisk/ Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/07/creating-swift-binaries-for-openwhisk/ In the previous blog post, we explained how to write Serverless Swift functions using OpenWhisk actions. Swift sources files are compiled into a binary by the platform before processing requests. This compilation process adds a delay on the invocation time for “cold” runtimes. If the action has not been invoked for a while, the system is under heavy load or multiple invocations are received in parallel, a new runtime will need to be initialised. https://jamesthom.as/2017/06/serverless-swift-with-openwhisk/ Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/06/serverless-swift-with-openwhisk/ Swift is one of the fastest growing programming languages with developers. Swift has reached a Top 15 ranking faster than any other language we have tracked. RedMonk Programming Language Rankings http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/03/17/language-rankings-1-17/ Created for building mobile applications, the language is now popular with backend development. But for Swift developers beginning to build backend applications, they now find themselves having to manage computing infrastructure to run their applications in the cloud. https://jamesthom.as/2017/04/python-packages-in-openwhisk/ Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/04/python-packages-in-openwhisk/ OpenWhisk’s Python runtime includes popular third-party libraries like requests, scrapy and simplejson. Developers don’t have to manually install packages to use those libraries. Great, but what about using other libraries that aren’t pre-installed? In a previous blog post, we showed how to deploy Node.js actions from zip files containing third-party modules. These modules are then made available in the Node.js runtime. Recent updates to OpenWhisk allow us to use the same approach with the Python runtime! https://jamesthom.as/2017/03/building-an-sms-bot-for-slack./ Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/03/building-an-sms-bot-for-slack./ This is smsbot. It provides an integration with Slack that connects SMS messages into channels. People can text an external number and have their messages posted into the channel. Channel users can respond to the messages and have their response sent back to the sender using SMS. smsbot was developed in under a few hours and less than one hundred lines of code using a serverless cloud platform. Want to understand how it works? https://jamesthom.as/2017/02/openwhisk-and-the-serverless-framework/ Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/02/openwhisk-and-the-serverless-framework/ The Serverless Framework is the most popular open-source framework for building serverless applications. Recent releases included support for using the framework with non-AWS providers. This feature makes it easier for developers to try different serverless platforms and move applications between providers. Since last summer, I’ve been leading the technical effort to provide an OpenWhisk provider plugin for the framework. OpenWhisk is the first non-AWS serverless provider to complete integration into the framework. https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-and-rust/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-and-rust/ This blog post is one of a series looking at using Docker Actions in OpenWhisk to support extra runtimes. Let’s look at writing serverless functions for OpenWhisk using Rust. Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. Rust has been growing in popularity since it launched in 2010. Rust is a popular language for writing microservices due to the focus on the attention to safety and strong concurrency support. https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-and-go/ Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-and-go/ In an earlier blog post, I explained how to use Go language binaries on OpenWhisk using Docker-based Actions. It relied on building Docker images for each serverless function and hosting them on Docker Hub. Recent updates to Docker-based Actions have made this process much simpler. Developers don’t need to build and expose public images anymore. Let’s re-visit the example from the previous post and see how to get it running using this new approach… https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-docker-actions/ Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2017/01/openwhisk-docker-actions/ OpenWhisk recently announced the following changes to Docker-based Actions. Developers can now deploy runtime files to the Action environment prior to invocation. This makes it much easier to support (almost) any programming language in OpenWhisk. Awesome! Let’s start by explaining how this new feature works… Docker Actions Docker Actions in OpenWhisk are built from the following repository using the python:2.7.12-alpine base image. This image is available on Docker Hub as openwhisk/dockerskeletion. https://jamesthom.as/2016/11/npm-modules-in-openwhisk/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/11/npm-modules-in-openwhisk/ OpenWhisk now supports creating Node.js Actions from a zip file. The archive file will be extracted into the runtime environment by the platform. This allows us to split microservice logic across multiple files, use third-party NPM modules or include non-JavaScript assets (configuration files, images, HTML files). “Hello World” Example Let’s look at a “Hello World” example of registering a serverless function from a zip file. Our archive will contain two files, the package descriptor and a JavaScript file. https://jamesthom.as/2016/10/serverless-logs-with-elasticsearch/ Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/10/serverless-logs-with-elasticsearch/ Serverless platforms can seem like magic. Taking your code and turning it into scalable microservices in the cloud without having to set up or manage any infrastructure. No provisioning VMs. No configuring Linux environments. No upgrading middleware packages. Which is wonderful until something goes wrong with your microservices in production… “Let me just log into the machine." Serverless platforms do not allow this. No tracing system calls. No running top. No connecting a debugger to the process. https://jamesthom.as/2016/10/openwhisk-workshop/ Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/10/openwhisk-workshop/ Serverless Conference comes to London later this month. IBM will be hosting a full-day workshop at the event. Developers can come and learn how to use OpenWhisk, the open-source serverless platform. I’m going to be one of the mentors on the day, along with members from the product team. Working on training material for the session, I remembered that the Node.js community had a popular workshop tool for running training sessions around the world. https://jamesthom.as/2016/09/openwhisk-and-node-red/ Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/09/openwhisk-and-node-red/ Node-RED nodes for OpenWhisk were initially released earlier this year. The nodes allowed users to manually invoke existing Actions and Triggers. This month, a new version of the package has been released providing a huge improvement in the functionality… features Users can now define new Actions using the flow editor UI, providing the source code through the inline node configuration panel. Users can also modify existing Actions, with the live Action source being previewed in the node editor panel. https://jamesthom.as/2016/09/microservices-without-servers/ Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/09/microservices-without-servers/ …is the title of my presentation about building serverless applications using OpenWhisk. Abstract Servers are killing your productivity. Rather than building better software for your users, you end up constantly distracted by maintaining computers. Wasn’t the “cloud” supposed to fix this? It sounded so promising until we realised it was just renting VMs in someone else’s datacenter. We couldn’t escape “servers”. Until now… In this session, developers will learn how to build microservices without servers, using modern “serverless” cloud platforms. https://jamesthom.as/2016/07/node-red-docker-images/ Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/07/node-red-docker-images/ This week, I’ve been helping create and publish official Docker images for the Node-RED project. Users can start Node-RED instances from these images using the following command. docker run -it -p 1880:1880 nodered/node-red-docker Node-RED is now publishing the following images to Docker Hub for each new release. latest - uses official Node.JS v4 base image. slim - uses Alpine Linux base image. rpi - uses RPi-compatible base image. When a new version is released on NPM, an automated CI service will build, test and publish new images with the updated version tags. https://jamesthom.as/2016/06/serverless-go-actions/ Tue, 21 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/06/serverless-go-actions/ There’s now a better way to do this! See here: http://jamesthom.as/blog/2017/01/17/openwhisk-and-go/ OpenWhisk, the open-source serverless platform, provides the ability to invoke custom Docker containers as serverless functions. Developers can create new Actions, referencing public images on Dockerhub. OpenWhisk manages creating and executing containers using these images per invocation request. Using this feature, developers can write serverless functions using the Go language. Compiled Go language binaries are embedded within custom Docker images and pushed into the platform. https://jamesthom.as/2016/06/openwhisk-and-mqtt/ Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/06/openwhisk-and-mqtt/ OpenWhisk Feeds provide the mechanism to bind external events sources to serverless function executions. Want to use OpenWhisk to listen for database updates to generate usage statistics? Or write Slack bots that respond to trigger words? Or notify users when Github project changes? Rather than manually listening for these events with an external application and calling OpenWhisk Actions through the API, OpenWhisk Feeds automate connecting external events sources with Actions. https://jamesthom.as/2016/05/cognitive-bots-with-ibm-watson/ Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/05/cognitive-bots-with-ibm-watson/ Later this month, I’m speaking at Twilio’s conference about building cognitive bots with IBM Watson. Preparing for this presentation, I’ve been experimenting with the IBM Watson services to build sample bots that can understand, and act on, natural language. IBM’s artificial intelligence system, [Watson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer), now provides a series of “cognitive” services available through IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. Developers can integrate everything from natural language processing, image and speech recognition, emotion analysis and more into their applications using RESTful APIs. https://jamesthom.as/2016/04/serverless-apis-with-openwhisk-and-api-connect/ Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/04/serverless-apis-with-openwhisk-and-api-connect/ “Serverless” cloud platforms are a major trend in 2016. Following on from Amazon’s Lambda service, released eighteen months ago, this year has seen IBM, Microsoft and Google all launch their own solutions. These platforms let you build stateless microservices, combining APIs with business logic, without servers. Microservices are executed on-demand, in milliseconds, rather than having to sit idle waiting for incoming requests. Users pay only for the raw computation time used. https://jamesthom.as/2016/04/playing-with-openwhisk/ Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/04/playing-with-openwhisk/ IBM recently launched OpenWhisk, their new “serverless” compute platform. This service allows developers to register small bits of code that are executed on-demand in response to external events. The “serverless” stack started in 2014, when Amazon launched Lambda, but is now set to be a major technology trend in 2016 with IBM, Microsoft and Google all launching their own solutions. OpenWhisk is the first open-source “serverless” platform. It supports running registered actions in Node. https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/debugging-live-containers-on-ibm-bluemix/ Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/debugging-live-containers-on-ibm-bluemix/ For the last few months, I’ve been using the ELK stack to collect logs from my Cloud Foundry applications. This service has been deployed on IBM Bluemix using a Docker container, previously detailed in this blog post, and running happily until it ran into issues this week. Trying to load the Kibana web application, the server was returning connection refused errors. Looking at the container in the IBM Bluemix dashboard showed no obvious signs of issues. https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/cloud-foundry-application-monitoring-bot-for-slack/ Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/cloud-foundry-application-monitoring-bot-for-slack/ Cloud Foundry makes it so easy to build, deploy and manage applications that it can be a struggle just to keep up with development progress… “Who is restarting this application?” “What is this new service instance?” “When did this application instance run out of memory?” Development teams are increasingly using Slack to collaborate on projects and using custom bots to manage and monitor applications, triggered through the channel messages. https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/npm-modules-in-node-red/ Mon, 04 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/npm-modules-in-node-red/ Before Christmas, my department at IBM had one of our semi-regular Hack Days to get everyone together and work on interesting ideas away from the day job. I spent the time playing with an idea to make exposing NPM packages in Node-RED easier… Node-RED is a visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things. It makes it easy to create, combine and control data flowing between hardware devices, web APIs and open protocols. https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/updated-ibm-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ Mon, 04 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2016/01/updated-ibm-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ Earlier this year, I made a major upate to the Node-RED nodes for the IBM Watson services available through IBM Bluemix. Since then, the IBM Watson team has been busy, with lots of changes to APIs. I’ve recently been working through these changes, updating the nodes, to ensure they work against the latest APIs. Updates to these nodes have now been finished and are available through the boilerplate on IBM Bluemix or by installing the IBM Bluemix Nodes package locally. https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/node.js-v4-in-cloud-foundry/ Fri, 18 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/node.js-v4-in-cloud-foundry/ Last week, Node.js released the latest version of their project, v4.0.0. This release, representing the convergence of io.js with the original Node.js project, came with lots of exciting features like improved ES6 support. Cloud Foundry already supports multiple versions of the Node.js runtime. Developers select the desired runtime version using a parameter in their application’s package descriptor. So, we just update package.json to include “4.0.0” and re-deploy our application? Not yet. https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/location-based-cloud-foundry-applications-using-nginx-and-docker/ Fri, 11 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/location-based-cloud-foundry-applications-using-nginx-and-docker/ Routing application traffic based upon the geographic location of incoming requests can be used for a number of scenarios… Restricting access to your application outside defined geographic regions. Load-balancing traffic to the closest region for improved performance. Providing custom applications for different countries. IBM Bluemix allows deploying applications to different geographic regions through hosting instances of the Cloud Foundry platform in multiple locations. Cloud Foundry supports simple HTTP routing rules for deployed applications. https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/running-one-off-tasks-in-cloud-foundry/ Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/09/running-one-off-tasks-in-cloud-foundry/ Whether making changes to a database schema, bulk importing data to initialise a database or setting up a connected service, there are often administrative tasks that needed to be carried out for an application to run correctly. These tasks usually need finishing before starting the application and should not be executed more than once. Previously, the CF CLI provided commands, tunnel and console, to help running one-off tasks manually. These commands were deprecated with the upgrade from v5 to v6 to discourage snowflake environments. https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/geopix-live-photos/ Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/geopix-live-photos/ Andrew Trice wrote a great sample application for IBM Bluemix called GeoPix. GeoPix uses the IBM MobileFirst services to provide a native iOS application which allows users to capture images from their mobile phones, storing them on the local device with automatic syncing to the cloud when online. Using a web application, the user can view their images over a map based upon their location when the photo was taken. https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/alchemyapi-amp-updated-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ Wed, 15 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/alchemyapi-amp-updated-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ I’ve recently been working on a number of updates to the Node-RED nodes for the IBM Bluemix platform… Highlights below: New AlchemyAPI Nodes There are two new nodes (Feature Extract and Image Extract) in the package, allowing users to call services from the AlchemyAPI platform. Feature Extract. This node will analyse external URLs, HTML or text content with features for text-based analysis from the AlchemyAPI service, e.g. keywords, sentiment, relationships, etc. https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/debugging-cloud-foundry-stack-issues/ Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/debugging-cloud-foundry-stack-issues/ Recent changes to the Cloud Foundry stacks supported by IBM Bluemix have led to a number of issues for users. I’ve helped users diagnose and fix issues that have occurred due to a mistmatches between the platform stack, applications and the buildpack. Learning a number of techniques for helping to discover and resolve these issues and I wanted to share them with everyone else. Running on Cloud Foundry’s Platform-as-a-Service solution, we take for granted that low-level concepts like operating systems are abstracted away from the developer. https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/making-logs-awesome-elasticsearch-in-the-cloud-using-docker/ Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/07/making-logs-awesome-elasticsearch-in-the-cloud-using-docker/ Logs are boring. It used to be the only time you’d be looking at your application logs was when something went wrong. Logs filled up disk space until they rotated out of existence. …but now businesses are increasingly focused on using data to drive decisions. Which advert leads to the highest click-through rates? How did that last website change affect user retention? What customer devices should our website support? Guess where the answers lie? https://jamesthom.as/2015/06/continuous-delivery-for-phonebot/ Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/06/continuous-delivery-for-phonebot/ Since creating Phonebot last month, I’ve been working on setting up a fully-automated build and deploy for the project. Using IBM DevOps Services, Phonebot now has “Continuous Delivery” enabled. When new code is commited to the external Github repository, the build service will perform the following tasks. Run Unit Tests and Code Lint Tools Deploy To Test Server Run Integration Tests Against Test Server Deploy To Production Each stage will only be executed if the following stage passes. https://jamesthom.as/2015/05/phonebot/ Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/05/phonebot/ Last month, a colleague was explaining he was not looking forward to an afternoon of long-distance conference calls. Having recently started using Slack for collaboration with their remote team, they lamented… I wish I could do my conference calls using Slack! …which got us thinking. Recent experiments with IBM Watson Speech To Text and Twilio on IBM Bluemix had shown how easy it was to create telephony applications. Slack publishes multiple APIs to help developers build custom “bots” that respond to channel content. https://jamesthom.as/2015/04/ibm-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ Wed, 22 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/04/ibm-watson-nodes-for-node-red/ I’ve updated the IBM Watson Nodes for Node-RED to include seven extra services. Previously, the package only provided support for the following services: Language Identification. Machine Translation. Question & Answers. With the recent code changes, users now have access to the additional services: Message Resonance. Personality Insights. Relationship Extraction. Speech to Text. Text to Speech. Tradeoff Analytics. Visual Recognition. Using Node-RED through the IBM Bluemix boilerplate will automatically include the IBM Watson modules in the palette. https://jamesthom.as/2015/04/creating-cf-cli-plugins/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/04/creating-cf-cli-plugins/ Since the v.6.7 release of the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (CF CLI), users have been to create and install plugins to provide custom commands. There’s now a whole community of third-party plugins to help make you more productive developing Cloud Foundry applications. Installing Plugins Plugins can be installed directly from the platform binary. $ go get github.com/sample_user/sample_plugin $ cf install-plugin $GOPATH/bin/sample_plugin …or discovered and installed directly from plugin repositories. https://jamesthom.as/2015/03/cloud-foundry-custom-buildpacks/ Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/03/cloud-foundry-custom-buildpacks/ Cloud Foundry Buildpacks provide runtime and framework support for applications. Users can rely on the built-in selection for Java, NodeJS, Python, etc. or additional community buildpacks from Github. Buildpacks are open-source, making them simple to customise and include libraries needed by your application. Doctor Watson uses an NPM module that relies on a command-line application, SOX, being installed in the runtime environment. Making this command-line application available on the platform required the project to create a custom NodeJS buildpack. https://jamesthom.as/2015/02/doctor-watson/ Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2015/02/doctor-watson/ Doctor Watson is an IBM Bluemix application to answer medical questions over the phone, using IBM Watson and Twilio. Ringing an external phone number, the application will answer and ask for a medical question to help with. Translating your speech into text and using IBM Watson’s Question and Answer service, Doctor Watson will query the medical corpus. Top rated answers will be converted to speech and used as a response over the phone. https://jamesthom.as/2014/07/zero-downtime-deployments-using-ibm-bluemix/ Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2014/07/zero-downtime-deployments-using-ibm-bluemix/ Here’s a video I’ve made showing you how to deploy new versions of an application on IBM Bluemix without the end-user having to suffer any down time: Utilising the Blue Green deployment pattern, we deploy the new version to a separate host within the production environment, rather than taking down and updating the existing application. The HTTP router in front of the applications controls tunnelling application requests between the different versions. https://jamesthom.as/2013/02/monki-gras/ Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2013/02/monki-gras/ Last week was Monki Gras, the conference organised by RedMonk, with this year’s theme being “scaling craft”. We plan to explore Craft that helps scale Technology, or Technology that helps scale Craft. What are the limits of a craft-based approach? Does quality have to suffer as businesses scale? James Governor http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2013/01/07/scaling-craft-tech-and-beer-monki-gras-conference-2013/ Held over two days in London’s Conway Hall, there was an incredible line-up of speakers, social events and evening activities. https://jamesthom.as/2013/01/server-side-dijit/ Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2013/01/server-side-dijit/ Modern Dojo applications often use declarative programming, annotating HTML elements with custom attributes containing module identifiers, to declare widgets and use client-side rendering with HTML templates to convert web pages into JavaScript applications. Client-side rendering often comes with a major complaint, the dreaded “pop-up effect”. This happens because the HTML initially displayed does not contain widget templates until after client-side rendering has finished. Essentially, the application has to load twice, once to download all the JS, CSS and HTML resources, then again, to render widgets client-side. https://jamesthom.as/2012/10/london-js-watson/ Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/10/london-js-watson/ Last month, I was invited to speak at LondonJS on the machine learning and artificial intelligence behind IBM Watson. I jokingly said the talk would win the prize for the “least amount of JavaScript-related content in a LondonJS talk”. The idea was to introduce the audience to topics (machine learning) that might be relevant in the future and IBM Watson was a great example that people love hearing about. Slides for the event are now posted online, check them out here. https://jamesthom.as/2012/08/olympic-bubbles/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/08/olympic-bubbles/ Introducing Olympic Bubbles, an experiment visualising mentions of the London 2012 Olympics sports on Twitter in real-time. With the London 2012 Olympics having multiple events running concurrently, Twitter’s become invaluable for catching up on the day’s action, deciding what to watch and getting real-time insight into current events. Having recently started to play with a JavaScript visualisation library (D3), this seemed like a great opportunity to connect the two activities and automate the analysis of Twitter to visualise the most talked about Olympic sports. https://jamesthom.as/2012/08/finding-nano-getting-dojo-under-4kb/ Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/08/finding-nano-getting-dojo-under-4kb/ There was a bold claim in the release notes for the 1.7 version of The Dojo Toolkit… Dojo Nano: Less than 4KB gzipped! With the move to the AMD module format, the new fully-compliant asynchronous module loader could be reduced to less than four thousands bytes! Loading unnecessary code was a common complaint against previous versions of The Dojo Toolkit but now we could have complete control over loaded modules using this tiny AMD loader. https://jamesthom.as/2012/05/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-3-controllers/ Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/05/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-3-controllers/ In the final article of this series, we’ll be looking at creating an MVC Controller for our sample todo application. We’ve already shown how to define our application model, creating a domain-specific todo model backed by localStorage, along with our view template, using widget templating to render our tasks into the page. The controller translates user input into operations on the model. Model View Controller Pattern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller Wikipedia For our application, we need to handle the user actions to allow adding, removing and completing tasks. https://jamesthom.as/2012/05/ibm-impact-2012-session-materials-available/ Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/05/ibm-impact-2012-session-materials-available/ Last week was IBM IMPACT 2012, IBM’s premier conference for our customers in Las Vegas. I was fortunate enough to be there for the duration, presentating four sessions on The Dojo Toolkit. The whole event was a fantastic showcase for our company, the capabilities and unique values we provide. Session materials from my talks are now available externally, see below for individual links. IBM IMPACT Sessions Optimizing Your Dojo Application Using The Dojo Build System Moving to Dojo 1. https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/debugging-optimised-dojo-applications/ Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/debugging-optimised-dojo-applications/ What happens when you’ve got an error occurring only in the minified version of your Dojo application? No matter how fantastic your debugging tool, there’s not much it can do with an optimised JavaScript source file with all the code on a single line. Usually, you resort to the frustrating experience of “black boxing” the issue, interrogating objects in the console and trying to reverse engineer the meaning of their renamed variables. https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-2-views/ Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-2-views/ In the previous article, we looked at defining our application Model using the Dojo MVC package. The model contained a list of todo tasks, each with a description and finished state, along with composite values representing the total completed and remaining task counts. Dojo’s MVC package provides a series of widgets (Group, Output, Repeat, Generate) that assist the rendering of model attributes in our View, which automatically update when model values change. https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/upcoming-talks/ Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/04/upcoming-talks/ Next month I’ll be presenting at IBM IMPACT 2012, IBM’s premier customer conference in Las Vegas from April 29th until May 4th. I’ve had three sessions accepted, full details below. If you’re attending the conference and want to say hello, please let me know. This week I was invited to present a preview of the joint session I’m doing with Dylan Schiemann at IMPACT for London AJAX. There was a really great crowd of over seventy developers waiting to hear all about AMD. https://jamesthom.as/2012/02/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-1-models/ Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/02/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-part-1-models/ In this first article, we going to look at using DojoX MVC to define our application Models, showing the use of the new StatefulModel class. Later in the series, we’ll look at binding our defined Model to a View template, rendering the HTML output and hooking into user events. Introducing StatefulModels DojoX MVC uses a specific class for representing Models in the MVC pattern, StatefulModel. By using or extending this class, applications have access to a native JavaScript data model that integrates with all the classes under the MVC package. https://jamesthom.as/2012/01/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-overview/ Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2012/01/creating-todo-mvc-in-dojo-overview/ Before Christmas, Addy Osmani sent out the following tweet asking for a Dojo-version of the TodoMVC application. Reviewing their Github page, the project aims to allow developers to compare MVC frameworks by providing implementations of a sample Todo application using different toolkit’s MVC support. They currently have over a dozen entries for toolkits, including Backbone, JavascriptMVC and Spine with more coming soon but, unfortunately, no entry for The Dojo Toolkit. https://jamesthom.as/2011/12/moving-to-dojo-1.7-and-the-path-to-2.0/ Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2011/12/moving-to-dojo-1.7-and-the-path-to-2.0/ Dojo 1.7 was released this month, giving users early access to lots of features that are going to be standard in Dojo 2.0, due late 2012. We’ve already been using early releases of Dojo 1.7 since the summer in my day-to-day role with IBM working on Watson, as we wanted to take advantage of the new module format, better mobile support and much more. With 1.7 now available, I wanted to share my experiences using it on a real project, showing developers what new features are available, how they can use them and what advantages this brings. https://jamesthom.as/2011/10/dojoconf-2011-building-dojo-in-the-cloud/ Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/2011/10/dojoconf-2011-building-dojo-in-the-cloud/ September saw this year’s Dojo Conference hit Washington, D.C for two days. Attending as one of this year’s speakers, I was given the second slot on Saturday morning to talk about the Dojo Web Builder. The presentation covered why we built the tool, what it can do (including a live demo), a high-level overview of the architecture and finished looking at how users have been using the tool since it launched in April. https://jamesthom.as/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://jamesthom.as/about/ James Thomas is an independent software consultant. He helps companies solve business problems using technology. James specialises in cloud application development (serverless). He also has extensive experience in open-source development and developer relations. If you would like to discuss James helping your business, please contact: consulting@jamesthom.as James worked at IBM for 13 years. He had numerous roles including Developer Advocate, Emerging Technologies Consultant, Open-Source Developer (Dojo Toolkit & Apache OpenWhisk) and Full-Stack Developer (IBM Watson).