Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Walter Poupore, Principal Programming Writer in the Windows Azure IX team. This post outlines valuable resources for developing Java apps on Windows Azure.

Make the Windows Azure Java Developer Center your first stop for details about developing and deploying Java applications on Windows Azure. We continue to add content to that site, and we’ll describe some of the recent additions in this blog. 

Using Virtual Machines for your Java Solutions

We rolled out Windows Azure Virtual Machines as a preview service last month; if you’d like to see how to use Virtual Machines for your Java solutions, check out these new Java tutorials.

• How to run a Java Application Server on a Virtual Machine – This tutorial shows you how to create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine, and then how to configure it to run a Java application server, in effect showing you how you can move your Java applications to the cloud. You can choose either Windows Server or Linux for your Virtual Machine, configure it, and then focus on your application development. 

• How to Run a Compute-intensive Task in Java on a Virtual Machine – This tutorial shows you how to set up a Virtual Machine, run a workload application deployed as a Java JAR on the Virtual Machine, and then use the Windows Azure Service Bus in a separate client computer to receive results from the Virtual Machine. This is an effective way to distribute work to a Virtual Machine and then access the results from a separate machine. 

By the way, since we’re mentioning Windows Azure Service Bus, it is one of several services provided by Windows Azure, some of which can be used independently of Windows Azure Virtual Machines. For example, you can incorporate Windows Azure Service Bus, Windows Azure SQL Database, or Windows Azure Storage in your existing Java applications, even if your applications are not yet deployed on Windows Azure. 

New in Access Control

Included in the June 2012 Windows Azure release is an update to the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies). One of the new features is the Access Control Service Filter, which enables your Java web application to seamlessly take advantage of ACS authentication using various identity providers, such as Google, Live.com, and Yahoo!. You won’t need to write authentication logic yourself, just configure a few options and let the filter do the heavy lifting of enabling users to sign in using ACS. You can focus on writing the code that gives users access to resources based on their identity. Here’s a how-to guide for an example –

• How to Authenticate Web Users with Windows Azure Access Control Service Using Eclipse – While the example uses Windows Live ID for the identity provider, a similar technique could be used for other identity providers, such as Google or Yahoo! 

We hope you find these Java resources useful as you build on Windows Azure. Tell us what you think; give us your feedback in the comments section below, the Windows Azure MSDN Forums, Stack Overflow, or Twitter @WindowsAzure.