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
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. 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_111 is the latest version, available for download here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html The JDK installer package comes in a dmg and installs […]
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 […]
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) […]