Craig Walls
Author, "Spring in Action" and "Build Talking Apps for Alexa"
Denver, Colorado, United States
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Craig Walls is an engineer with Broadcom, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring in Action, Spring Boot in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring, Alexa, and Generative AI. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.
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Creating Flexible APIs with Spring GraphQL
Typical REST APIs deal in resources. This is fine for many use cases, but it tends to be more rigid and less efficient in others.
For example, in an shopping API, it's important to weigh how much or how little information should be provided in a request for an order resource? Should the order resource contain only order specifics, but no details about the order's line items or the products in those line items? If all relevant details is included in the response, then it's breaking the boundaries of what the resource should offer and is overkill for clients that do not need it. On the other hand, proper factoring of the resource will require that the client make multiple requests to the API to fetch relevant information that they may need.
GraphQL offers a more flexible alternative to REST, setting aside the resource-oriented model and focusing more on what a client needs. Much as how SQL allows for data from multiple tables to be selected and joined in response to a query, GraphQL offers API clients the possibility of tailoring the response to provide all of the information needed and nothing that they do not need.
In this example-driven session, we're going to look at how to implement GraphQL in Spring. You'll learn how Spring for GraphQL builds upon GraphQL Java, recognize the use-cases that are best suited for GraphQL, and how to build a GraphQL API in Spring.
The Talking App: An introduction to developing voice experiences for Alexa
The way we communicate with our applications is an ever-evolving experience. Punch cards gave way to keyboards. Typing on keyboards was then supplemented by pointing and clicking with a mouse. And touch screens on our phones, tablets, and computers are now a common means of communicating with applications.
These all lack one thing, however: They aren’t natural.
As humans, we often communicate with each other through speech. If you were to walk up to another human and start tapping them, you’d likely be tapped (or punched) in response. But when we talk to our applications, we communicate on the machine’s terms, with keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Even though we may use these same devices to communicate with other humans, it’s really the machine we are communicating with—and those machines relay what we type, click, and tap to another human using a similar device.
Voice user-interfaces (Voice UIs) enable us to communicate with our application in a human way. They give our applications the means to communicate to us on our terms, using voice. With a voice UI, we can converse with our applications in much the same way we might talk with our friends.
Voice UIs are truly the next logical step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. And this evolutionary step is long overdue. For as long as most of us can remember, science fiction has promised us the ability to talk to our computers. The robot from Lost in Space, the Enterprise computer on Star Trek, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and HAL 9000 (okay, maybe a bad example) are just a few well-recognized examples of science fiction promising a future where humans and computers would talk to each other.
Our computers are far more powerful today than the writers of science fiction would have imagined. And the tablet that Captain Picard used in his ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation is now available with the iPad and other tablet devices. But only recently have voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant given us the talking computer promised to us by science-fiction.
In this example-driven session, we'll explore the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and see how to develop skills for Amazon's Alexa. You'll learn how to use the ASK CLI to jumpstart skill development and how to create conversational applications in NodeJS.
Kontain Your Spring
Although Java originally promised write once, run anywhere, it failed to fully deliver on that promise. As developers, we can develop, test, and build our applications into WAR or executable JAR files and then toss them over the wall to a Java application server and Java runtime that we have no control over, giving us zero confidence that the application will behave the same as when we tested it.
Containers fulfill the write-once, run anywhere promise that Java wasn't able to, by packaging the runtime and even the operating system along with our application, giving greater control and confidence that the application will function the same anywhere it is run. Additionally, containers afford several other benefits, including easy scaling, efficiency in terms of resource utilization, and security by isolating containers from their host system and from other containers.
While deploying Spring applications in containers has always been possible, Spring Boot 2.3 makes it easier to containerize our applications and run them in container architectures such as Kubernetes. Spring Boot 2.3's support for containerization includes two options: Creating containers based on buildpacks or using layers as a means of modularizing and reducing the size of our application deployments. Moreover, new components in the Spring ecosystem can make your Spring applications Kubernetes-savvy so that they can take advantage of what a containerized architecture has to offer.
In this example-driven session, we're going to look at how to create and deploy Spring applications as container images and deploy them into a Kubernetes cluster. Along the way, we'll also get to know a few of the most useful tools that a Spring developer can employ in their development workflow when building containerized Spring applications. And we'll look at how components of the Spring ecosystem can work with your Spring applications to enable them to thrive in a Kubernetes cluster.
Alexa on the Go: Building Location Aware Voice Experiences for Alexa
When you think of voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, you probably are thinking of a device on a shelf or a desk somewhere, tethered to a power outlet. But what if you could take Alexa with you wherever you go?
Several devices allow for mobile Alexa, including Echo Auto, Echo Frames, Echo Buds, Fossil Gen 6 watches, and the TalkSocket. You can even take Alexa with you on your phone using the Alexa app or on your Apple Watch using the Voice in a Can app. Being able to take Alexa with you opens a whole new world of possibilities, enabling voice application developers to create voice experiences that help users no matter where they are.
In this session, we'll see how to create Alexa applications (called "skills") that can take advantage of Alexa while on-the-go. You'll learn how to gain permission to access the user's location and provide information relevant to that location. We'll also have a look at a real-world Alexa Skill that uses location awareness to enhance a visit to Disneyland or Disney World theme parks.
Craig Walls
Author, "Spring in Action" and "Build Talking Apps for Alexa"
Denver, Colorado, United States
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