One of our favorite things to do at awesome developer conferences is to announce the latest developments for developers. At SpringOne, we will unveil new tools and services, including several new releases and Java support for Azure cloud services. Come by our booth and check out these demos:

1. Java on Azure and Azure Stack
2. Spring Boot apps & Spring Cloud Azure modules
3. Cloud Foundry on Azure with OSBA
4. Java monitoring with Application Insight

Azure App Service on Linux for web applications

This service is the easiest and fastest way to get started with your web applications on Azure. On top of enhancements to the service, we will be releasing the following updates:

5. Enhanced Apache Maven Plugin
6. Enhancements to Azure Toolkits for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEs

Azure Service Fabric Mesh

Service Fabric Mesh is the serverless microservices platform in Azure. It is a fully managed Service Fabric environment that abstracts away all infrastructure including VMs, storage, orchestration and networking. Service Fabric Mesh allows developers to innovate on their business logic and build mission-critical microservice applications that can run side-by-side with lift-and-shift workloads.

For Java applications, product updates and releases:

7. JCache API support on Reliable Collections: Service Fabric Reliable Collections can be used as a library anywhere, and when you run it on a Service Fabric cluster, your cache becomes highly available through transparent replication (while providing you co-location of compute and data for low-latency workloads).
8. Apache Maven plugin: Easily create, build and deploy Java applications on Service Fabric Mesh

Azure Dev Spaces for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Public Preview

Azure Dev Spaces provides a rapid, iterative Kubernetes development experience for Java development teams. With minimal dev machine setup, you can interactively run and debug Java containers directly in AKS. You can also collaborate with your team in a shared Kubernetes cluster, or integrate with your CI/CD pipeline, for end-to-end testing with other components without replicating or mocking up dependencies. To get started, check out the Quickstart for Java.

Presentations at SpringOne Platform

Other Microsoft engineers and I will be present at the conference to deliver these updates and other topics of interest to attendees. Sessions to check out and add to your schedule:

9. Building Responsive Systems with Serverless, Event-driven Java
10. Running Serverless Applications Using Spring and Microsoft Azure
11. Going Cloud-Native with Spring Cloud Azure
12. Hacking Spring Boot Applications Using Visual Studio Code
13. Beyond Windows Hacking Cloud Apps on Linux and .NET for the Busy Java Developer

Stop by and chat with us in the exhibition hall at booth #8 and come discuss any of these 13 things and check out our demos on Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure, Azure Application Insights, Spring tooling support, Open Service Broker API, Azure Stack, and much more! Of course, grab some swag when you stop by too.

Finally, don't miss out my presentation on Wednesday's main stage keynote, at 10am. I hope you will enjoy it.

See you soon!

The post 13 things to look for at SpringOne Platform appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

Why is this important? For starters, increasing clarity around a project makes it easier to build a community and gain contributors. It also increases consumer’s confidence in open source. Overall, it serves as an important piece of the end-to-end ecosystem that has developed around the production and consumption of open source.

ClearlyDefined fills a "data gap" in the open source management ecosystem today. There are many great efforts around tools, formats, and processes for open source, but few directly address how to get or manage the data to put in the tools, formats or processes. ClearlyDefined's sole purpose is to harvest, curate and provide essential data such as the license, copyright holders, source location, and security vulnerabilities for individual open source components. That data is then available to developers as they select components to use, to legal and security teams as they assess what they have, and compliance teams as they ensure they are respecting the wishes of the projects.

This data is also a boon to open source projects as they are often consumers of other open source work. Making it easy for producers to understand the nature of components they consume makes it easy for them to know what they are bringing into their community.

The team in Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office has been contributing to this project and is a part of the community growing around the technology, curation, and upstream work. We are very excited to help develop ClearlyDefined along with many other organizations, companies, and individuals who are producing and/or consuming open source. Every day we are engaging with more and more open source teams. ClearlyDefined is crucial to understanding the nature of their code. We love the mindset and the project fits seamlessly into our engaged approach to open source.

ClearlyDefined provides infrastructure and processes that enable crowd-source curation of mechanically harvested data. Like any open source project, community contributors untangle ambiguities, fill gaps, or verify discovered information. Each contribution is reviewed and discussed in the open, and if accepted, ultimately merged and made available upstream to the original open source project.

It is telling that some of the initial participants include the Eclipse Foundation, well known for understanding the importance of this kind of information to building confidence in a community. By being part of the OSI, ClearlyDefined augments the OSI's mission of educating, advocating, and stewarding open source discovering, curating and contributing the data is a logical extension.

The project is only just starting, but it strikes a chord with folks who encounter it. Even with its initial focus on licensing related info, security will come later, there is a ton of work to do. Everything from building connections with upstream communities to understand how they work, promote adoption, and acceptance of upstreamed changes, to defining a curation process and building a curation community, to implementing and running the website and tools that power the system.

What chord does it strike for you? Want to get involved? Check out https://docs.clearlydefined.io/get-involved.

More about this project from our partners:

https://opensource.org/clearlydefined
https://360.here.com/here-clearlydefined-foss

The post Join OSI and Microsoft in the new ClearlyDefined project appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

The post Updates to HDInsight tools for IntelliJ and Eclipse now available appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

For rapidly-growing, Middle Eastern small- to medium-sized businesses, hiring the best employees is a challenge. Both busy employers and ambitious talent find the existing job boards slow and cumbersome. In response, start-up SocialDice has made the process easy, intelligent, and fun by aggregating regional job boards in one place and using a proprietary smart algorithm that slashes the time it takes to make the ideal connection between great opportunity and outstanding talent.

Professionals looking for their next break and fast-growing small companies needing help

In an ideal world, there would be no gap between hirers and job seekers. But unfortunately, such a gap does exist in the rising economy of the Middle East. The hiring process's bureaucracy and unreliability too often frustrate both employers and applicants. And who has time to trawl through the thousands of CVs constantly being thrown up online?
Internet technologist and entrepreneur Saed Shela understood the problem thoroughly, and wanted to be the one to solve it. What if intelligence were applied to the problem, at scale, to speed up the process? The result of his insight: a highly-promising new technology platform, SocialDice. Nurtured under Microsoft's BizSpark program, the platform has already made life a lot easier for hiring managers.
SocialDice is a Microsoft ASP.NET front end powered by a unique mix of proprietary AI software, written in Java, running on Linux on Microsoft Azure and the Open Source MySQL database engine. The specially developed smart system rapidly scans, filters, and routes candidate details and pattern-matches them to the best openings. This saves both sides of the Middle Eastern hiring 'equation' a huge amount of time and effort.
But is SocialDice helping organizations solve the problems Shela identified? For a growing band of relieved regional employers, the answer is a resounding 'yes!' Employers from UAE and Jordan are now enjoying a much easier hiring process based on infinitely better data and are easily able to find the qualified professionals they need.

Microsoft: 'A genuine willingness to help'

Shela says of all the decisions he has made so far, opting for Microsoft has probably been his best. "We were on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but Microsoft offered us an excellent alternative. Customer service is outstanding with BizSpark, and the Azure credits are really helpful for building in the future," he enthuses. Saed is also impressed with what he has seen of Azure's own planned AI extensions in the Machine Learning space: "We think that will help us work even more quickly and accurately."
Nael Ramadan, the innovative company's head of technology, echoes Saed's sentiments regarding Azure. "We started off with AWS, but I got very frustrated with their lack of responsiveness. We ran into a technical issue at an early stage which meant loss of data, and I just couldn't get through to anyone to assist us. In contrast, working with Microsoft under BizSpark and on Azure could not be greater. There is a genuine willingness to help."

Software and Services

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Azure
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 – Azure
• Microsoft Azure Ubuntu Linux
• Microsoft Azure ML
• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC4
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Service

Open Source Technologies

• Apache Ant
• Apache Tomcat
• Boostrap Framework
• Cayenne ORM
• Eclipse Juno
• Eclipse Luna
• iBatis
• JSoup
• Postgres
• Selenium
• SoapUI
• Spark ML
• Spring
• Stanford NLP
• Tika
• Visual Paradigm

The post SocialDice: Revolutionizing talent recruitment in the the Middle East appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.