Deploying your groovy / java app via anynines

Meet James – Jim – Northrop. One of our most active users – he recently wrote a tutorial on how to use the Gradle Cloud Foundry plugin to target anynines – he has now experimented with deploying a Groovy application to anynines.  

If emoticons are really your thing you should definitely check out his post (we love him for this), else: continue to scroll down for a summarized version.

We’ll be using Caelyf, a lightweight Groovy toolkit for Cloud Foundry. Groovy in turn is an ‘agile and dynamic language’ for the Java Virtual Machine. Typically, we manage applications using tools on our local client machines. This is done in either of two ways.

Table of Contents

• 1. Install a deployment tool
• 2. Use a build tool

1. Install a deployment tool

You can install and manually use a deployment tool. We suggest using the Cloud Foundry CLI for this. It has a lot of flexibility to help you manage your Caelyf applications. Cloud Foundry is a professional tool and can take a bit of effort to get used to it, but Oliver, one of our developers, has written some great stuff on how to get started (like this and this).

2. Use a build tool

Build tools are more automatic. Ant, or an IDE tool like Netbeans or Eclipse can be very helpful, but we’ll be using Gradle (1.12). Gradle can extend it’s feature set via plug-ins, and it has a Cloud Foundry plugin we can use to quickly deploy an app. With this plugin, you don’t need to install the Cloud Foundry CLI.

If you care to try out this short-cut, you’ll need a few things.

• Ability to work directly with your operating system using the command line
• Be able to change directories when needed
• A text editor
• A membership account with any Cloud Foundry PaaS provider
• The email address and password of your PaaS membership at the ready
• A working internet connection
• An up-to-date Java runtime environment (JRE). You can check your version using the following command:
  java -version
  note that versions that precede 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 may not work

We’ve made a sample application, and you can download its source code. As such it’s almost ready to deploy. Just needs your credentials and app name, really. Looking into the sample code and pieces, you’ll be able to get the hang of it all quicker.

Happy deploying!