With most modern Android phones, just saying the phrase “OK Google” will launch the Google assistant app, which is capable of answering simple questions, or functioning as a app launcher. Following up with “open g mail” will launch the Gmail app on your phone, or saying “navigate home”, will open the Google Maps app, with […]
java
Serverless compute with Java, on AWS Lambda
Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model, in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Serverless computing allows running applications and services, without thinking much about servers, runtime resources, or scaling issues. A very simple serverless computing application is intended to be used as a template project, a model, or starting […]
Debugging your Alexa Skill
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 […]
Installing Tomcat on macOS 10.12 Sierra
The Servlet 4.0 specification is out and Tomcat 9.0.x does support it. Time to dive into Tomcat 9. [updated on Oct.16.2017] Prerequisite: Java Since OS X 10.7 Java is not (pre-)installed anymore, let’s fix that first. As I’m writing this, Java 1.8.0_144 is the latest version, available for download here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html The JDK installer package comes in […]
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 […]