After getting the Echo Dot device I looked for a way to trigger a local network control system with the help of Alexa. Unfortunately (or obvious) any Alexa skill needs to have an endpoint somewhere reachable from Amazon. But I do not want to have any security concerns when opening a port for the public.
I have started a Java related podcast in german. First episode: NoNameFound - E01
More than half a year ago I wrote a MVC 1.0 introduction. Playing a little bit more with MVC 1.0 and giving a talk about it somehow did not convince me to keep following the (good) early-draft development. For more informations about MVC 1.0 you should visit Bennet Schulz.
Maybe one or two of you might noticed that there is something in the upcoming Java EE8 release worth to mention if you are doing web apps. The JSR 371 a.k.a. MVC 1.0 is an approach to establish a standardized Model-View-Controller framework.
In my last article I introduced hystrix to keep control of your (remote) interfaces. It helps to make your connection solid against timeouts or errors on the wire but also helps you to work with a broken connection by introducing circuit breakers with fallback results. This feature also reduces the requests from your systems to nearly zero and gives the other system a chance to breathe. Let’s explore some more features in hystrix.
A few month ago I read Release It! - a highly recommended book no matter if you are doing dev, ops or devops. One key aspect described in this book is the usage of so called circuit breakers. Generally they are used to have a handy kill switch around watching your interfaces.