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(2016-10-05) Functional Reactive Endpoints with Spring Framework 5.0

I need some recommendations for worthy alternatives to Dropbox. I've found a few but would love some input and recommendations as this will, no doubt, be very painful.

Note: I was recently asked about CQRS and its role in buiilding microservices. I threw together an email - high level, devoid of specific technologies (like Spring Cloud Stream, Axon, or Eventuate) that looks at some of the patterns for connecting distributed systems. I figure I may as well share it here, briskly edited.

I regretfully share that I've had to drop out of OSCON 2016. I've wanted to be back at OSCON, especially in light of its move to Austin, and I tried very hard to reschedule but it was not to be. That said, it looks like you'll be in good hands! I've had my friend Kenny substitute for me at the Cloud Native Workshop workshop and it looks like Baruch will be able to give another talk even though I've had to drop out of our joint submission. I'm so very sad to miss this year's show! It looks amazing! Here's to next year..

This was my first Craft Conf. I have been invited every year since the debut and have always had to decline in order to make the Great Indian Developer Summit (a great show to be sure!), to which I was previous committed. This year, I finally remembered to give it a shot and I am so glad I did! I met many of my heroes and heroines and see many old friends all in one dense, information packed show. The content was superb, the endless Nespresso and beer made the occasional intermissions go over well, and (incredibly!) the wi-fi was top-notch, as well. It was a genuinely good show.

The amazing Pieter Hintjens is not well. He's contributed a lot to the open-source community, notably to the AMQP protocol (which underpins RabbitMQ) and to ZeroMQ. He's talked about his state in a blog called A Protocol for Dying. If you're a fan, perhaps now's your chance to let him know. If you're not a fan, then perhaps you could investigate some of his work? He leads the ZeroMQ project, wrote a few books, and did a lot of great videos. I really liked this one from 2015's Craft Conf. I'll be at Craft Conf (starting today, actually) this year and I'll be thinking of Pieter.

I was in Paris the week of March 22nd, 2016, with customer meetings and meetups in both Brussels, Belgium and Paris, France scheduled. Indeed, I arrived in Paris, and was due to travel, by train, the morning of March 22nd, 2016, to speak with customers and to appear at a meetup that evening. I woke up in the morning, in Paris, to a barrage of tweets and text messages from concerned family and colleagues (some of whom may as well be family); the unspeakable had happened. Earlier that morning, terrorists, cowards, attacked the Brussels station and murdered dozens of innocent people. I was encouraged to stay in Paris. My customers understandably evacuated their local staff and sent them home. We rescheduled the in-person meetup and directed all the would-be attendees to join us for a remote webinar which was well-received. I was not among the victims of that horrific day. I was safe, far away, in Paris, France. I was due to travel there, though. I know, logically, that I was never at risk because of the schedule. It disturbs me that it was as simple as the schedule: my travel was scheduled eight hours later. That's it. I am here because I had morning obligations in Paris, and the victims of that nightmare didn't. I am so very fortunate. I am so very sad those lost were lost. I am so sorry. Nothing can make right what happened.

I was scheduled to appear at JPoint, a conference in Novosibirsk, Russia. I was very excited to go, I purchased tickets and - because my schedule is very busy and I spend very few contiguous days in the US before in which I could secure a VISA, before having to venture out to parts unknown, I had to commit more than $800 USD towards securing an expedited VISA through a travel agent. Which I did. And then came the big day when I was to board a flight from Los Angeles to Russia, via China. It was a long-haul flight but I was excited. I got to the airport late as I was stuck in traffic in Los Angeles. The front desk was already closed and I couldn't even proceed to security. For some reason, the front desk wouldn't let me check in online enroute, so by the time I got there, there was no way to checkin, either. It was so frustrating. I called my travel agent and explained the situation and - miraculously - the agent with whom I was speaking found a route that left later, got me there earlier and was cheaper! Amazing! I had her book it! I waited in the airport, already exhausted, only to amble to the checkin counter (I couldn't even checkin and get to a lounge or somewhere comfortable for hours, before) only to discover the flight was to Moscow. Not Novosibirsk, the destination city. I scrambled. Was there a flight that connected from Moscow? Surely it couldn't be that big a delta?? It was. It was equivalent to landing in Los Angeles when I had a meeting in New York City where the timezone was three hours ahead. It was the wrong flight and it was too late to find an alternative flight, Star Alliance or not. This was so very frustrating and I wish the situation had been different. I am sorry, and I hope that, next time, things are better.

I recently got a new machine and did a brew cask install intellij-idea and then quickly went to a dozen different customer meetings. When the dust finally settled, I realized I was being prompted by OS X's firewall and security subsystem to confirm that IntelliJ could accept incoming connections on every launch of IntelliJ, as shown here:

Kenny and I have been hard at work on the O'Reilly Cloud Native Java book, and Phil and I have been hard at work on the updated Building Microservices with Spring Boot LiveLessons for the more in-depth introductions to Spring Boot and Spring Cloud, but I am very happy to report that we on the Spring team finally started to add guides to the Spring Guides section on service registration and discovery, Zuul-based microproxies for routing and filtering, circuit breakers, and centralized configuration! Get 'em while they're hot!

Spring Boot is a convention-over-configuration centric approach to application development with Spring.