Tonight, Google France was hosting the Paris Ansible meetup, and I had the chance to play the Master of Ceremony, by introducing the speakers for the evening, as well as give a brief introduction to the Google Cloud Platform, as well as outlining where Ansible users and DevOps engineers might be interested in learning more.

Here’s my quick overview of the Google Cloud Platform:

I had the pleasure of presenting at the Nordic APIs Platform Summit 2016 in Stockholm this week. I enjoyed the conference a lot, with great speakers and content, flawless organization, and nice interactions with the audience.

For the last keynote of the conference, I had the chance to present about Google Cloud Endpoints, Google’s take on API management. I worked on a little “pancake”-powered demo, deploying a Ratpack application, in a Docker container, on Google Container Engine. I created an OpenAPI Specification describing my Web API that served pancakes. And used the Extensible Service Proxy to receive the API calls for securing (with an API key), monitoring (through the Cloud Console) and scaling my Web API (thanks to the scaling capabilities of Container Engine). This demo will be the topic of some upcoming blog posts.

As I was working on a demo for one of my talks at Devoxx, I was encountering a bug in my Groovy code (a Gaelyk app using Glide). I had deployed a new version of my App Engine app, changing some code to persist some data in the Datastore. After those changes, I saw a trace in the logs:

Looks like there’s an error in receiveTweet.groovy on line 11. And there’s a link! Although I hadn’t linked the source code to the application, I was surprised to see this link. But I knew that Stackdriver is able to pick up sources in different ways (from uploaded local files, from a Google code source repository, from Github or BitBucket, or with a “source capture”).

How do you filter access to your VMs on Google Cloud Platform? During a discussion with a customer, I was asked this question: only certain IP addresses or a range of IP addresses should have access to a particular VM. Let’s see that in action!

Let’s assume you already have an account on Google Cloud Platform, but if you don’t, don’t miss the $300 credits for a free trial! I created a new project, then navigated to the Compute Engine section to create a new VM instance. I used all the default parameters, except that I checked the checkbox for “Allow HTTP traffic”, at the bottom of the following screenshot:

I was playing with the new IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Google App Engine yesterday. The plugin depends on the gcloud SDK to do its work. And I started exploring gcloud a little bit more.

I was experiencing some odd bug which prevented me to run my application locally with the App Engine’s local app server. It was a bug which was present in an old version of gcloud and its App Engine component, so I had to update the SDK and its App Engine Java component to fix it. No big deal, but what I wanted to highlight here was a little detail about that upgrade process.

Next week will be this time of the year where tons of Java developers are gathering & meeting in San Francisco for JavaOne. It’ll be my 10th edition or so, time flies!
This year, I’ll participate to a couple sessions:

• Java and the Commoditization of Machine Intelligence [CON2291]
  It’s a panel discussion with representative from IBM, Microsoft and Google to talk about Machine Learning APIs. I’ll be covering the ML APIs from Google Cloud Platform: Vision, Speech, Natural Language.
• A Groovy Journey in Open Source [CON5932]
  In this session, I’ll cover the history of the Apache Groovy project, and talk about the latest developments and new features.

Google colleagues will also be present to speak about:

A bit of web scraping with Jsoup and REST API calls with groovy-wsclient helped me build my latest demo with Glide / Gaelyk on App Engine, but now, it’s time to look a bit deeper into the analysis of the White House speeches:

I wanted to have a feel of how positive and negative sentences flow together in speeches. Looking at the rhetoric of those texts, you’d find some flows of generally neutral introduction, then posing the problem with some negativity connotation, then the climax trying to unfold the problems with positive solutions. Some other topics might be totally different, though, but I was curious to see how this played out on the corpus of texts from the speeches and remarks published by the White House press office.

After my Twitter sentiment article, those past couple of days, I’ve been playing again with the Cloud Natural Language API. This time, I wanted to make a little demo analyzing the text of speeches and remarks published by the press office of the White House. It’s interesting to see how speeches alternate negative and positive sequences, to reinforce the argument being exposed.

As usual, for my cloud demos, my weapons of choice for rapid development are Apache Groovy, with Glide & Gaelyk on Google App Engine! But for this demo, I needed two things:

What’s the mood on Twitter today? Looking at my little twitter demo from a few weeks ago (using Glide & Gaelyk on Google App Engine), I thought I could enrich the visualization with some sentiment analysis to give more color to those tweets. Fortunately, there’s a new API in Google-town, the Cloud Natural Language API (some more info in the announcement and a great post showing textual analysis of Harry Potter and New York Times)!

The brand-new Cloud Natural Language API provides three key services:

Back in 2009, I created Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for developing Google App Engineapps using the Apache Groovyprogramming language. I even had the chance to speak at Google I/O 2009about it! Good times, good times… Vladimír Oranýlater joined me in maintaining and evolving Gaelyk, and Kunal Dabircreated the fun Glide project, which is a thin wrapper around Gaelyk to further streamline the development of small to mid-sized apps for Google App Engine.

Today, I want to share with you a quick start guide to develop a little app, that shows some tweets from selected accounts with the Twitter API(thanks to Twitter4J), and using the Material Design Light template for the look’n feel (I used the “dashboard” template). I won’t list all the exact steps, all the precise changes made to the templates, etc, but I want to give you the keys for having a productive experience with Glide and Gaelyk on App Engine. And here’s a screenshot of what we’ll be building: