For some scripting tasks, my favorite go-to tool is the Groovy Console, and writing code with Apache Groovy. Usually, you just spill some println calls all over the place to display some textual information. But there’s a little known secret. Not really secret though, as it’s properly documented. It’s possible to display images (like BufferedImage or its parent java.awt.Image) or all sorts of rich components (from the Swing UI toolkit, like JPanel, JLabel, etc. Read more...

I started blogging 20 years ago, in April 2003. My first blog engine was a PHP CMS, called Nucleus. I was hosting it on my ISP, at free.fr. Then in 2011, I wrote my own blog engine, called Bloogaey, which was written in Groovy, using my little Gaelyk web framework, and running on App Engine. As it became a bit painful to properly format my blog posts, and evolve my blog engine, I decided I should move to something that is more static, with a static site generator that eats Markdown files: I chose the Hugo static site generator that I used in some previous projects. Read more...

With the beta of the new Java 11 runtime for Google Cloud Functions, Java developers can now write their functions using the Java programming language (a language often used in enterprises) in addition to Node.js, Go, or Python. Cloud Functions allow you to run bits of code locally or in the cloud, without provisioning or managing servers: Deploy your code, and let the platform handle scaling up and down for you. Read more...

Java celebrates its 25th anniversary! Earlier this year, the Apache Groovy team released the big 3.0 version of the programming language. GMavenPlus was published in version 1.9 (the Maven plugin for compiling Groovy code) which works with Java 14. And today, Google Cloud opens up the beta of the Java 11 runtime for Cloud Functions. What about combining them all? I’ve been working for a bit on the Java 11 runtime for Google Cloud Functions (that’s the Function-as-a-Service platform of Google Cloud, pay-as-you-go, hassle-free / transparent scaling), and in this article, I’d like to highlight that you can also write and deploy functions with alternative JVM languages like Apache Groovy. Read more...

A new Java runtime was announced for Google App Engine standard: with Java 11. It’s currently in beta, but anybody can already try it out. Another interesting announcement was the fact that the instances running your apps now get double the memory! So with this double dose of great news, I decided to craft a little tutorial to show how to deploy a Micronaut application on App Engine Java 11. And because Apache Groovy is, well, groovy, I’ll go ahead and use Groovy for my programming language, but of course, the same steps apply to Java workloads as well. Read more...

At GR8Conf Europe last year, I talked about how to take advantage of the Google Cloud machine learning APIs using Apache Groovy. With Groovy, you can call the Vision API that recognises what’s in your pictures, or reads text. You can invoke the Natural Language API to understand the structure of your text. With the Speech-To-Text API, you can get transcriptions of what’s been said in an audio stream, or with Text-To-Spech, you can also generate human-like voices from your own text. Read more...

Powerful machine learning APIs are at your fingertips if you’re developing with Google Cloud Platform, as client libraries are available for various programming languages. Today, we’re investigating the Cloud Vision API and its Java SDK, using the Apache Groovy programming language—a multi-faceted language for the Java platform that aims to improve developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. At GR8Conf Europe, in Denmark, the conference dedicated to the Apache Groovy ecosystem, I spoke about the machine learning APIs provided by Google Cloud Platform: Vision, Natural Language, Translate, and Speech (both recognition and synthesis). Read more...

Last week at GR8Conf Europe, I spoke about the machine learning APIs provided by Google Cloud Platform: Vision, Natural Language, Speech recognition and synthesis, etc. Since it’s GR8Conf, that means showing samples and demos using a pretty Groovy language, and I promised to share my code afterwards. So here’s a series of blog posts covering the demos I’ve presented. We’ll start with the Vision API. The Vision API allows you to: Read more...

Back to GR8Conf Europe in Denmark, for the yearly Groovy community reunion! I had the chance to present two talks. The first one on Google’s Machine Learning APIs, with samples in Groovy using vision recognition, speech recognition & generation, natural language analysis. I’ll come back on ML in Groovy in forthcoming articles. And the second talk was an overview of Google Cloud Platform, focusing on the compute and storage options, with demos using Groovy frameworks (Ratpack, Gaelyk, and the newly released Micronaut) and how to deploy apps on Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, App Engine. Read more...

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. Read more...