Application Insights, Visual Studio Online and Azure Tools for Java Developers
Today more than ever, the tools and services we are building are targeting a broad array of developer needs - from cross-platform mobile development tools in Visual Studio, to support for a wide range of programming languages and operating systems in Azure.
This week at EclipseCon we had the opportunity to talk with Java developers about some of the areas where we are bringing key Microsoft developer and platform services to Java development. With increasingly heterogeneous development organizations, teams, and applications, it is more important than ever to have great tools that support the breadth of application development needs within a project.
Here are a few of the areas we talked about this week for Java developers across Application Insights, Visual Studio Online, Team Foundation Server and Azure.
Application Insights SDK for Java
Application Insights (currently available in preview) gives developers a 360 degree view of their application’s availability, performance and usage. By adding simple agent SDKs into each component of an application, critical telemetry is collected across the application and aggregated into actionable data and insights in the Azure portal.
This week we introduced the Java SDK for Application Insights, a fully featured Application Insights agent for Java applications. Even better, this SDK is open source on GitHub, along with in-progress work on SDKs for Android, iOS, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and WordPress. Along with our recent acquisition of HockeyApp, these SDKs are part of our work to make Application Insights available across the widest possible range of application scenarios.
Visual Studio Online for Java Developers
Both Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online support Java development across planning, source control, collaboration, build, test and deployment. Whether your teams develop in Java, .NET or in multiple languages, Visual Studio Online offers an open, cloud-hosted development hub and is free for up to 5 users.
For Java developers, Visual Studio Online fits into existing workflows - you can use popular IDEs such as Eclipse, build technologies such as Ant or Maven, source control systems such as Git and community integrations with tools such as Jenkins.
This week we launched a new portal Java page on Visual Studio Online with resources for Java developers to get the most out of Visual Studio Online.
Azure Toolkit for Eclipse
Microsoft Azure supports Java across a wide range of compute, data and application services. The Azure Java developer center includes documentation, tutorials and resources for Java developers to get started with Azure.
Building upon the Azure SDK, the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse provides templates and functionality that allow Eclipse users to easily create, develop, configure, test, and deploy arbitrarily complex, multi-tier, highly available and scalable cloud services and applications to Microsoft Azure on OS X, Linux and Windows. This week we released several significant updates to the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse.
Both the Azure SDK for Java and the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse are also open source on GitHub, and we encourage developers to join us in continuing to improve these tools.
Conclusion
We continue to expand our developer tools and services to address a broad base of heterogeneous developer scenarios for both Windows and .NET developers as well as developers targeting a range of other languages and operating systems. This week we announced the next wave of support for Java development across Visual Studio Online, Azure and Application Insights. We will continue to build on this support across our developer services in the coming months and years.
Namaste!