Best of Bluemix: Bouwen van life-saving apps, integreren van Minecraft met Watson en migreren LAMP app

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This post regularly showcases some of the best new Bluemix tutorials, videos, and other content published each week on developerWorks.

We’ve published scads of helpful (and fun!) Bluemix content since I last posted. Here’s a round-up of some of our favorites:

• Build life-saving, world-changing apps with Bluemix: In this video for developers, IBM Distinguished Engineer Kyle Brown discusses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and applies the concepts to the needs of people affected by natural disasters. From these needs, Kyle shows you how Bluemix runtimes and services plus open source tools and APIs can be quickly pulled together to create apps that help people affected by natural disasters.
• Create cognitive plugins for Minecraft with Bluemix, Docker, and Watson: What single Java™ program has been used more than any other by a whole order of magnitude? If you guessed Minecraft, you win! In this tutorial series, you’ll learn how to use Docker, Eclipse, and Bluemix to develop, extend, and host your own Minecraft servers. You’ll use Eclipse to build Minecraft plugins, test them locally using Docker, and use Bluemix to host your Docker containers on the Internet. You’ll also harness the power of IBM Watson services for more educational and interactive game play.
• Migrate a LAMP application to Bluemix: Popular and prolific author Chun Bin Tang believes that Bluemix is an ideal platform for LAMP apps. In this tutorial, he walks PHP developers through migrating their apps to Bluemix. He describes the following concerns:
  • PHP runtime requirement – The PHP buildpack needs to fulfill the app requirements, such as PHP version, enabled PHP extensions, and other relevant settings.
  • Database migration – In addition to a meeting the app’s database server requirement and implementing data loading, it’s necessary to set up a way to access the database from the app.
  • Nonpersistent file system – The Bluemix runtime file system isn’t persistent (it refreshes after a redeployment of an app). The migration needs to take into account whether such behavior affects the app being migrated and implement persistent storage for the application if necessary.

  Chun Bin shows developers how to resolve these issues and migrate a LAMP application to Bluemix with the help of the Bluemix mysql and Object Storage services. You’ll use the Drupal app as example to build a simple blog site on Bluemix. Drupal – a classic LAMP app – is a popular open source content management system, written in PHP, that powers millions of websites and applications ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites.

Get started with Bluemix on dW

dW has an entire section dedicated to Bluemix. Check out the Bluemix “zone” for more great how-to and introductory content on Bluemix, including quick-starts, a list of tutorials available for each Bluemix service, and more.

If you’re new to Bluemix, get started with Bluemix Fundamentals, a series of tutorials and videos that steps you through the basics of building, deploying, and managing your first app with Bluemix. Choose your favorite programming language (Node.js, PHP, or Java) and then learn how to:

• Deploy your first app
• Set up team collaboration and automated deployment
• Add a DB service and other cloud services to your app

Each tutorial has a detailed outline of steps and a quiz at the end to test what you’ve learned.