Hi everyone, welcome to the October update of Java on Azure Tooling. In this update, we will share our investments for the next few months of Java on Azure Developer Tools. Besides, we will also introduce the support for VMWare Tanzu App Accelerator extension in the VS Code Extension for Azure Spring Apps. We hope you enjoy these updates and have a smooth experience with our Azure toolkit. Please download and install the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ. Let’s get started.

Roadmap Update

We are delighted to announce our roadmap for the next six months. Our goal is to provide a smooth code-to-cloud user journey to help Java developers create, code, deploy, and monitor their applications with ease and efficiency. Here is a picture that summarizes our investment areas.

Code-to-Cloud User Journey Improvements

Code-to-cloud user journey is always one of our top priorities, which involves the process of developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring applications in the cloud. We understand that developers always spend a lot of time and efforts in each step because of switching to different tool or opening the portal at the same time. Based on these reasons, we plan to enhance this journey and offer a set of features in each stage to help developers to deliver faster, more reliable, and more secure applications on Azure.

To help you create new projects easily, we are aiming to enable developers to select Azure modules in the scaffolding process, such as Azure Functions, Azure Web Apps, Azure SQL Database, etc. For coding experience, we plan to provide intelligent resources assistance, such as code completion and navigation for Azure resources. Going forward, we will also investigate how to leverage native run configuration and integrate resources into Services tab for easy access in IntelliJ IDEA during development. Besides, we will improve the monitoring experience by enabling them to open streaming logs in console in a native way.

AI Experience Enhancement

Our next focus is to leverage Azure OpenAI experience in our toolkit. In previous releases, we have added support for Azure OpenAI and its chat playground, which have been popular among tooling developers. Going forward, we plan to support more models provided by Azure OpenAI Service. Besides, we will also explore how to provide Azure Migration Tools for non-Azure Java Projects to reduce manual work and save time by using the power of AI.

Provide Better Tomcat Experience

Tomcat experience is an essential part of Java development on Azure App Service. For Java developers who want to deploy Tomcat apps to Azure App Service, we have conducted some research before and intend to support a native Tomcat experience inside IntelliJ IDEA. Besides, we plan to enhance the troubleshooting experience to help them diagnose applications easily, such as remote-debugging support.

Keep up-to-date with Latest Azure Services

Our next area of investment is to keep up to date with the latest Azure Services. We will continuously provide support for latest features of Azure services, such as Flex Consumption support, default Java runtime update for Azure Functions, etc. We also plan to make some investigations to maintain some key features of Azure Container Apps and Azure Kubernetes services in the next few months.

Last but not least, we will continue to reduce the error rate and failures to provide better user experience.

October Release and Feature Summary 

VS Code Extension for Azure Spring Apps Updates

The VS Code Extension for Azure Spring Apps has added support for the VMWare Tanzu App Accelerator extension in the latest release. Application Accelerator for VMware Tanzu can help you bootstrap developing your applications and deploying them in a discoverable and repeatable way. For more information, please visit this documentation. To use this new feature, you can right-click on the instances of Azure Spring Apps Enterprise and select “Open Application Accelerator” to continue.

Feedback and Suggestions

Please don’t hesitate to try our product! Your feedback and suggestions are very important to us and will help shape our product in the future.

• Leave your comment on this blog post
• Create a feature request or submit a bug on our official GitHub Issues page
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Resources

Here is a list of links that are helpful to learn Java on Azure Tooling.

• Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ documentation
• Azure Toolkit for Eclipse documentation
• Maven Plugin for Azure Web Apps/Functions/Spring Apps
• Gradle Plugin for Azure Web Apps/Functions
• VS Code extension for Azure Spring Apps