Upcoming on the 6-Month Roadmap for Java on Azure Tools

Jialuo Gan

April 14th, 20240 0

Hi everyone, welcome to the March 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 introduce the support for managing resources using connection strings. 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 excited to announce our roadmap for the next few months. Our goal is to consistently enhance the code-to-cloud experience for Java developers which allows them to seamlessly build and deploy their applications to Azure as well as manage Azure resources within our tools. Here’s an overview of our investment areas: 

Image Java on Azure Tooling Dt Roadmap N1

Keeping Up-to-date with Latest Azure Services

Supporting the latest Azure services is always one of our top priorities. We will continuously provide the latest Azure features of Azure Functions, Azure Web App, Azure Cosmos DB, and other Azure services in our tooling, which will help developers manage and deploy applications more easily. This will include features such as Flex Consumption support, updating the default Java runtime to Java 21 for Azure Functions, and delivering Azure Cosmos DB for Mongo vCore support. 

Building Cloud-native Apps with Containerized Services 

For Java developers running containerized applications in a cloud-native environment, we understand that most of them choose to host their workloads on either Azure Container Apps (ACA) or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To enhance their code-to-cloud journey, we are planning to deeply integrate with Java on Azure Container Apps. This will empower developers to run containerized Java applications in the cloud, with flexible deployment options from source code or artifact files, and strengthen security posture and better attune memory configuration for the container environment. Furthermore, we have plans to support a set of key features for containerized services, including Azure Functions on ACA. 

Better Guidance to Intelligent App Experience  

Our next focus is to enhance the experience of building intelligent apps within our toolkit. In previous releases, we have introduced support for Azure OpenAI service and its chat playground, which has been well used by Java developers. To further assist developers who want to create intelligent apps using Azure OpenAI service, we plan to invest in supporting additional models, including Completions and DALL-E. 

Azure SDK Enhancement 

To better help developers leverage Azure SDK in Java projects, we are exploring the integration of the Azure SDK Build Tool into Azure toolkit and Maven plugin. This enhancement will enable developers to validate the correct usage of Azure SDK and detect outdated libraries within their projects. 

Last but not least, we will continue to keep the documentation of Azure Toolkit up to date. Furthermore, our team is working to minimize error rates and failures to provide better user experience. We hope these improvements will greatly increase developers’ productivity within our tools. If you have any feedback or questions regarding the roadmap, feel free to share them with us! 

Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ Improvements

Support for Managing Resources Using Connection Strings 

When Java developers interact with Azure services, such as Azure storage account, we have been hearing feedback from them that they need more support in authenticating with Azure services using connection strings. With our latest release, we have enabled you to establish connections between your applications and Azure storage account resources via connection strings. This enhancement offers a simpler way to authenticate your application to Azure Storage account and   help you manage your resources with security. To use this feature, simply paste the connection string directly into the Project view or Services view. Here is a short demo of it. 

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.

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Resources

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

 

Jialuo Gan Program Manager, Developer Division at Microsoft

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