Microsoft has unveiled an update to its Java on Azure Tooling, introducing a newly designed application-centric view for the Azure toolkit used with the IntelliJ IDE. The update aims to make the interface more user-friendly while adding support for a broader range of Azure services and enhancing Gradle plugins. Additionally, it brings new features for Azure Web Apps and Azure Functions.
Back in April, an app-centric view for Azure Explorer was announced in the product roadmap. The Azure Explorer, as explained by Jialuo Gan, a program manager in Microsoft's Developer Division, in a blog post, was a collection of logic services like Web Apps, Function Apps, Spring Apps, Virtual Machines, Storage Accounts, Databases, and more. However, these services were grouped by resource types instead of applications (resource groups).
Gan stated that this view made it difficult for developers operating in the Azure Explorer to manage and understand different services or offerings involved in one application. Some developers reportedly lost focus or felt overwhelmed by the view of resources grouped by service type. To address this issue, the update changes the display organization of these services, helping developers better recognize and define an application's components. Gan further explained that developers would now see a view of Azure resources grouped by application.
Developers can now find the root node, Resource Groups, in the Azure Explorer, allowing them to view all resources belonging to the same resource group placed together for each application. Users can also create or delete a resource for a resource group per application.
The Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ's developer team also revealed that Application Insights (used for monitoring and other functionalities) is now available, enabling developers to manage Application Insights directly in Azure Explorer.
Gradle plugin improvements have also been introduced, including support for deployment slots. Developers can now utilize a separate deployment slot instead of the default production slot when deploying web apps or function apps to Azure App Service. Microsoft explained that this method allows developers to validate app changes first in a staging deployment slot and then swap them into production within the same App Service.
Looking ahead, the developer team has planned work for 2022 focused on enhancing integration with Azure services, user experience, cloud-native development, inner-loop optimizations for Azure-based code, performance and reliability, deep integration with Java on Azure services, and more.
The toolkit's documentation can be found here. The toolkit update is part of Microsoft's ongoing Java on Azure push, which includes updates to Azure Spring Apps and the general availability of Azure Spring Apps Enterprise.
Azure Spring Apps, launched in 2019 in collaboration with VMware, is a Microsoft-managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering designed to help developers create modern microservice patterns for Spring Boot apps by eliminating boilerplate code and speeding up app development in the cloud. Spring Boot, an open-source Java-based framework, is widely used for developing stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications with a focus on microservices.
The Enterprise tier now supports 0.5 core and 512Mi memory for vCPU versions, eliminating the need to specify Runtime for Enterprise Tier apps, as the runtime will be auto-detected from the source code or artifact to deploy. After deployment, users can right-click the node with the Show properties option to see the configuration.
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