Getting started with BlueMix

BlueMix is IBM's devOps in the cloud.  We could call it full featured and not be far off.  There are lots of starting points, templates for projects that can jump start your development.

You might want to have Git and CloudFoundry installed on your machine before you start.  Ant and Maven might be helpful too.

The initial view into BlueMix that I want to talk about is the dev Dashboard.  This shows your apps.  We'll start with a clean slate.  I have no apps and no services yet.  I'm going to start by clicking on Create An App.  From there I select a Runtime.  I'll use the WebSphere Liberty Java. Then it asks for an app name.  I'll call this MQTTMaps.  And my host access URL will be MQTTMaps.mybluemix.net.  Then I'll click Create.

Now the Dashboard view has changed.  It shows me my MQTTMaps application,  I can get back to the dev Dashboard by using the Back to Dashboard button at the top left.

Now it tells me I can add a service, which we might do in a bit.  I can also add a git.  That will give me access to the source code via a git repository.  Mow I can edit code.  But first, let's run the out-of-the-box app and see what it does.  So I go to http://mqttmaps.mybluemix.net/ and in there it shows me a link to some documentation.  If I go back to the dashboard page, there's a View Quick Start menu option.  It tells me how to get started, how to download my app starter kit, install CloudFoundry, and do some basic cloudfoundry steps.  Then it says to make edits and build a war file, and then deploy the war file.  So we'll try that.

I'll just copy in my web content files from the MQTT demo I've been working on,

Next, find Ant, and set ANT_HOME, and then JAVA_HOME has to point to a jdk. copy a command prompt, cd to my project and run ant, and it looks like it's built.

Now let's push... using cf

give it time to restart...

and... yeah... perfect... I will have to use this to demo to the group tomorrow.,