Background In the tech world, adaptability is key. As our startup, Roster Portal, evolved over the years, so did our needs. We started our journey with Assembla.com back in 2011, leveraging its robust source control and ticketing system. For reference on just how old that is, we were using Subversion – not Git back then! However, as time passed, we […]
Recently my family went through a loss of a loved one. When I tried talking about it to my coworkers, it was clear that they were wanting to be supportive. However the condolences they gave to us were very difficult to respond to, and at times impossible. I am sure anyone that has been in a similar situation has heard […]
Download & install rewrite module The first hurdle in achieving this is that you don’t want to use the Redirect IIS module, but the Rewrite one which has to be downloaded separately. You can download it from here, but I script my server bootstrapping so preferred to use PowerShell for this. See below for an example on how to programmatically […]
Papertrail is a great free* cloud based distributed log management system. If you aren’t currently using one for your application, I highly recommend it. The benefits it gives you far outway the relatively simple process of setting it up. And compared to tools like Splunk, it’s considerably cheaper. However, sometimes clients can have unusual requests and require you to go […]
When developing a new frontend application for mobile or web, you will often find yourself needing to add a backend to support your development needs. Reasons for this could be that the Domain APIs that your client side application needs to communicate with are not publicly accessible (i.e. in an internal VPC) or you need to handle session management and […]
If you use a workflow tool such as Trello, Assembla or Jira to help manage software development and are also using Git for your source control, you will often want to automatically update or add a comment to cards whenever a new commit is made. Luckily, you can do this easily if you are using AWS CodeCommit by creating a […]
Docker is a fantastic way to run micro-services like Dropwizard in a cloud environment. Because the service should be stateless, you can spin up multiple instances of them easily, allowing increased resilience (if one instance becomes unresponsive), simplified no outage deployments (can easily spin up new versions of the software) and much more. Docker also runs instance in their own […]
This is actually Part 5 of the “Building a Kotlin Dropwizard Maven REST API from scratch” series but I have broken it out into it’s own post for two reasons. Firstly this part is only useful if you want your API to talk to another API, while very common, is not always the case. Secondly this could be useful on […]
Part 4: Running We have configured our dependencies, wrote and configured a Kotlin Dropwizard resource and tested it. Now we need to run it! If you are using an IDE, open the file App.kt and you should be able to right click or to the left be able to run the @JvmStatic fun main method.You should see some text come […]
Part 3: Testing Before we run anything, it is probably a good idea to know it’s going to behave the way we intended to. The best way to do this is to write test, we can do this using normal junit testing (I am sure you are familiar with from Java) and it’s the same in Kotlin. In the src […]