A new Java 8 runtime for Google App Engine standard is coming soon, and is currently in alpha testing. You can request to join the alpha program, if you want to try it out for yourself. But I wanted to let anyone play with it, easily, to see how well the Java 8 APIs work, but also to try some Java 8 syntax too. So here’s a web console where you can do just that!

You know what? It’s Pi Day today! Well, if you follow the American date standard, it’s 3.14 today, a nice approximation of Pi. Last year, in a past life, I had played with Pi already, but this year, my awesome colleagues (Ray, Sandeep, Francesc, Ian) have been working on some very cool demos around Pi, with the “Pi delivery”, at https://pi.delivery/

You can transform the Pi digits in a nice melody, show a D3.js based visualisation of the transitions between digits, you can stream the Pi digits, and more. And you can learn about how it’s been developed on the Google Cloud Platform.

Today was announced the general availability of Google Cloud Endpoints!

Endpoints is the Google Cloud Platform solution for Web API management, which lets you easily protect & secure your API, monitor it, without overhead, and even allows you to implement your API with any language or framework you want.

I’ve spoken about Endpoints a few times already, at Devoxx Belgium, Nordic APIs summit, and APIDays Paris. And you can see the recording of my Nordic APIs appearance, if you want to learn more about Cloud Endpoints:

For Google Cloud Next and Devoxx France, I’m working on a new talk showing how to build a conference assistant, to whom you’ll be able to ask questions like “what is the next talk about Java”, “when is Guillaume Laforge speaking”, “what is the topic of the ongoing keynote”, etc.

For that purpose, I’m developing the assistant using API.AI. It’s a “conversational user experience platform” recently acquired by Google, which allows you to define various “intents” which correspond to the kind of questions / sentences that a user can say, and various “entities” which relate to the concepts dealt with (in my example, I have entities like “talk” or “speaker”). API.AI lets you define sentences pretty much in free form, and it derives what must be the various entities in the sentences, and is able to actually understand more sentences that you’ve given it. Pretty clever machine learning and natural language process at play. In addition to that, you also have support for several spoken languages (English, French, Italian, Chinese and more), integrations with key messaging platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twilio, or Google Home. It also offers various SDKs so you can integrate it easily in your website, mobile application, backend code (Java, Android, Node, C#…)

The schedule for Google Cloud Next was unveiled this week, and there’s lots of interesting sessions to attend. With the many parallel tracks, it’s difficult to make a choice, but I wanted to highlight some of the talks I’d like to watch!

The Google Cloud Platform is a pretty rich one, with many options for your compute needs. How do you choose which one is best for your use case? Brian Dorsey covers this in detail in this session:

The purpose of this article is to deploy a Ratpack web application on Google App Engine Flex.

For my demos at conferences, I often use frameworks like Ratpack, Grails or Gaelyk, which are based on the Apache Groovy programming language. In a previous article, I already used Ratpack, but on a slightly more complex use case, but this time, I want to share a quick Ratpack hello world, and deploy it on Flex.

I started with a hello world template generated by Lazybones (a simple project creation tool that uses packaged project templates), that I had installed with SDKman (a tool for managing parallel versions of multiple Software Development Kits). But you can go ahead with your own Ratpack apps obviously. Feel free to skip the next section if you already have an app.

The GA release of Cloud Natural Language API is easier to use, better at recognizing language nuances and adds additional support for Spanish and Japanese

Earlier in November, we announced general availability for the Cloud Natural Language API and highlighted the key new improvements. This launch included many additions to the API like expanded entity recognition, granular sentiment analysis with expanded language support, improved syntax analysis with additional morphologies and more.

Many of these improvements were the result of feedback from beta users, so thank you for your contributions! But concretely, what do these updates mean? Let’s take a closer look.

All sorts of voice-powered assistants are available today, and chat bots are the new black! In order to illustrate how such tools are made, I decided to create my own little basic conference assistant, using Google’s Cloud Speech API and Cloud Natural Language API. This is a demo I actually created for the Devoxx 2016 keynote, when Stephan Janssen invited me on stage to speak about Machine Learning. And to make this demo more fun, I implemented it with a shell script, some curl calls, plus some other handy command-line tools.

Gradle is becoming the build automation solution of choice among developers, in particular in the Java ecosystem. With the Github archive published as a Google BigQuery dataset, it’s possible to analyze those build files, and see if we can learn something interesting about them!

This week, I was at the G3 Summit conference, and presented about this topic: I covered the Apache Groovy language, as per my previous article, but I expanded my queries to also look at Grails applications, and Gradle build files. So let’s see what the dataset tells us about Gradle!

Probably for vanity sake, or perhaps even out of jealousy seeing friends becoming “twitter verified”, I was curious to see if, me too, I could get those little ticks beside my name on my Twitter profile.

Generally speaking, verified accounts are accounts of “public interest”. It can range from your usual movie stars, to politicians, from well-known artists, to company CEOs, but also persons somehow well known in the twittosphere, including tech luminaries, representative of particular tech communities, etc. So, seeing my tech friends getting the little tick, I thought I should try that out.