Hosting a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform can be more or less involved, depending on the implementation language and hosting platform you pick. If you have some experience with the Java-Servlet life-cycle, then implementing a skill in Java, using Amazon’s Alexa-Skills-Kit library for Java, available in this Maven Repository and on Github, becomes an […]
Java
Hosting an Alexa Skill yourself
If experimenting with the Amazon Echo / Alexa Skill Kit or running a so-called Skill in production, you generally have two choices: AWS Lambda functions on AWS Lambda (a service offering by Amazon Web Services) Hosting the Web service yourself. If you decide against AWS Lambda, you can build the Web service, using Java Node anything […]
Installing an SSL Certificate on Tomcat
If you have Tomcat installed on your Mac or Linux computer, like I have shown here and here, you may sooner or later want to serve content not only through HTTP, but also securely through HTTPS. Instead of going the self-signed certificate route, where the certificate is signed with its own private key, I’m describing […]
Java 8, Tomcat 8, and Jersey on Mac OS X
A while back, I wrote a blog post on how to quickly develop and deploy a Web app in Java, using RestEasy on top of Tomcat. While this worked well, I never felt really comfortable with the rest-easy dependencies. Moreover, since I wanted a really lean web-app, manually extracting only the absolutely necessary jars from the rather […]
Installing Java 8 and Tomcat 8 on Debian Jessie or Raspbian or RedHat
Apache Tomcat is a Servlet/JSP container and version 8.0 implements the Servlet 3.1 and JavaServer Pages 2.3 specifications. Please note that Apache Tomcat 8.0 requires a Java Standard Edition Runtime Environment (JRE) version 7 or later. So we start with installing a recent version of Oracle’s JRE. Install Oracle JRE 8 on Debian Linux (or Raspbian) […]