The venerable Google App Engine platform celebrated its 10th anniversary!

Back in 2008, it started with Python, as its first runtime, but I got way more interested in App Engine when the Java runtime would launch the following year. It’s a bit of a special story for me, as I’ve always been a fan of App Engine, since the beginning.

Over the years, I’ve built several apps running on App Engine. For instance, this blog you’re reading now is running on App Engine, as well as my personal picture / video sharing app, some Github post-commit webhook for the Apache Groovy project, or the Groovy Web Console to share / edit / run Groovy scripts in the cloud.

The Java Champions recently nominated me to become a Java Champion!

Please welcome the new Java Champions. @antoine_sd @javajudd @glaforge @kenkousen @kito99 @vlad_mihalcea
@leomrlima @net0pyr @shelajev @rgransberger @rmehmandarov  @Sander_Mak @SeanMiPhillips Well done to all of you @OracleDevs @java #odevcommunity pic.twitter.com/X9yeek641s

— Java Champions (@Java_Champions) November 22, 2017

There’s also a post on the Java Champions’ blog, and InfoQ also echoed the new nominees recently.

I’m super happy and proud of this nomination, and I’m looking forward to continuing being involved in the Java ecosystem, present at Java-friendly conferences, contribute to Open Source projects using Java and Apache Groovy, and write articles here and there using my favorite languages.

A few weeks ago, I’ve started a new blog dedicated to Google Cloud Platform, to share tips’n tricks I come across while exploring the platform, getting to know new products, or gathered through experience with a particular service I’ve been using:

https://googlecloud.tips/

With the holidays season, I went with a “2018 countdown” approach (like an “advent calendar” without the religious connotation), where I publish a tip every day of the month of December.

Once in a while, when talking about Gradle with developers, at conferences or within the Groovy community (but with the wider Java community as well), I hear questions about Gradle. In particular Gradle vs Maven, or whether developers adopt the Kotlin DSL for Gradle builds.

In the past, I blogged several times about using BigQuery and the Github dataset to analyze open source projects hosted on Github, by running some SQL queries against that dataset. You might want to have a look at this past article on some Gradle analysis with BigQuery. Considering those questions popped up recently, I decided to do a quick run through those questions with some simple queries.

In my timeline, I saw a tweet from Joe Walnes about the built-in HTTP server available in the JDK since Java 6. It’s super convenient, starts super fast, easy to use, but I often forget about it. I’d probably not use it for serving planet-wide load, but it’s very useful when you need to create a quick service, a little mock for testing some web or micro-service.

Here’s a little hello world for the fun.

Today, there were some interesting announcements for Actions on Google, for building your conversational interfaces for the Google Assistant. Among the great news, one item particularly caught my attention: the improved SSML support:

After deploying in the cloud, there’s a new trend towards programming in the cloud. Although I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, there are a couple of handy tools I’ve been enjoying when working on the Google Cloud Platform.

I had been using the built-in Cloud Shell console, on the Google Cloud console, to have a terminal already pre-configured for my Google Cloud project. It allows you to easily have access to your whole environment, run commands, etc, just like you would from your own computer. The fact that all the command-line tools you can imagine (gradle, maven, gcloud sdk, etc) are already there is helpful, as well as the fact that you are already configured for using other cloud services.

I’ll be back at JavaOne in San Francisco in October to speak about Apache Groovy and Google App Engine.

Apache Groovy

I’ve been involved with the Apache Groovy project for 14 years now, it’s a long time, and it’s interesting to see how the language has evolved over time, how it was influenced by other languages, but also how it influenced those other languages itself! Let’s see which operators or syntax constructs evolved and moved from one to the other.

InfoQ recently released a video from the APIDays conference that took place in Paris last year. I talked about scaling an Open API based web API using Cloud Endpoints, on the Google Cloud platform.

I spoke about the topic a few times, as web APIs is a topic I enjoy, at Nordic APIs, at APIDays, or Devoxx. But it’s great to see the video online. So let me share the slide deck along with the video:

Time flies! Last week was my first “Googleversary”: It’s already been a year since I joined Google Cloud as a Developer Advocate. What a ride it’s been so far!

I announced my move to Google in June last year. And since then got the chance to:

• talk at more than 20 conferences or meetups
• give 3 keynotes
• write 36 articles
• meet with a dozen customers or so
• addressed literally thousands of developers

For some conferences, like Devoxx Belgium, I even spoke 5 times! Or for my trip to Singapore, I had 6 talks or workshops lined up!