Recent by Niklas Heidloff 

Recent Java Updates from IBM  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/12/19, 2:43 PM | - | Added by Kenio Carvalho

Oracle has changed the licensing for commercial use. Fortunately IBM open sourced OpenJ9 which is available together with the OpenJDK at no cost from AdoptOpenJDK, even for commercial use.

Introducing Blue Cloud Mirror, a Fun IBM Cloud Showcase  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/23/19, 11:15 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Blue Cloud Mirror is a game where players need to show five specific emotions and do five specific poses in two levels. The faster, the better. Play the game. It only takes a minute. All you need is a webcam and a Chrome browser.

IBM Think 2018 Highlights for Developers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/23/18, 10:17 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last week IBM hosted the Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas which is IBM’s flagship conference that combines previous conferences like InterConnect and World of Watson. Below is a list of announcements and news that I, as a developer, like most.

Presentation how to create Alexa Skills with IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/2/18, 3:52 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last week there was a webinar Create Alexa skills with Watson Conversation where I was supposed to present. However since I couldn’t make it, my colleague Mark Sturdevant jumped in on a short notice and did a great job. You can watch the recording, read the pattern documentation and read the slides.

When to use Serverless? When to use Kubernetes?  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/1/18, 8:20 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

A question that I get asked very often these days is: Should I use Serverless or Kubernetes to build cloud native applications? Both computing options have pros and cons and it depends on your needs which option you should choose.

Creating Alexa Skills with OpenWhisk and IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 11/16/17, 3:43 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

My first code pattern (formerly known as developer journeys) has been published on developer.ibm.com/code. The pattern describes how to build Alexa skills with OpenWhisk. Rather than using intent and entity identification from Alexa, Watson Conversation is used. This allows developers to define conversation flows declaratively and developers can reuse conversations that are available in the Bot Asset Exchange.

Integrating Applications without writing Code  

By Niklas Heidloff | 11/14/17, 8:41 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM App Connect is an IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) to connect different applications without having to write code. Similarly to IFTTT users are typically business users or citizen developers from line of business departments. App Connect provides currently roughly 50 connectors to integrate applications like Salesforce, SAP, Slack and Gmail.

How to write your own Slack Chatbots in Javascript  

By Niklas Heidloff | 10/16/17, 12:11 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last week Ansgar Schmidt and I gave a session at Codemotion How to write your own Slack Chatbots in Javascript. Below are the slides with screenshots of our demos. We demonstrated how to write a Node.js application that uses Botkit to connect with Slack and that uses IBM Watson Conversation as natural language processing service.

Node-RED Samples for IBM Watson IoT Hackathon  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/11/17, 7:31 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Recently I gave an one hour webinar to help developers to prepare for a hackathon related to IBM Watson IoT. I demonstrated Node-RED and coded live some sample flows.

Accessing Bluemix Services from Client-side Web Applications  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/7/17, 6:45 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Bluemix is IBM’s cloud platform to build and host applications which can leverage more than 100 services, for example databases and cognitive services. The services provide APIs which require credentials. Applications which are hosted on Bluemix as Cloud Foundry apps or Docker containers can access these credentials from environment variables. This article describes how to invoke Bluemix services from client-side web applications.

Introducing the Conversation Inspector for IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 7/31/17, 9:01 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

My colleague Ansgar Schmidt and I have developed a new tool for developers to simplify building conversational user experiences with IBM Watson Conversation. The tool displays JSON data of REST API requests that is sent between applications and the Watson Conversation service and it allows developers to modify outgoing JSON messages.

GitLab now available in Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 5/31/17, 8:08 AM | - | Added by Kenio Carvalho

I’m still catching up on all the new functionality that has been added to IBM Bluemix over the last year. One new capability is to use GitLab for source control and lightweight project management.

Deploying Angular 2 Apps to Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/11/17, 8:12 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Over the last months I’ve done quite a lot of Angular 2 development (now Angular 4). Below is a description how to create a new Angular app and deploy it as Docker container to Bluemix in just a few minutes. There are several ways to deploy Angular apps to Bluemix. For example you can build a simple Node.js web server to host the files. Or you can leverage existing HTTP servers like nginx.

Understanding Natural Language Text via IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/17, 12:39 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

One of the newer IBM Watson offerings that I really like is Watson Knowledge Studio. It basically allows identifying information in unstructured data. Below is a quick overview of the Knowledge Studio functionality.

Using IBM Watson Discovery to query Unstructured Data  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/17, 12:15 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

In my previous blog entry I described how to use Watson Knowledge Studio to create models to identify information in unstructured data. These models can be used by the Watson services and offerings Watson Discovery, Watson Explorer and Watson Natural Language Understanding. Below is a quick intro how to use Watson Discovery to query unstructured data.

Quick Update  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/1/16, 6:05 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Some people have asked why I haven’t blogged since June. Here is why … Almost two years ago I started to work for IBM Emerging Technologies. I wanted to work in this group for multiple reasons. One reason was because some of the people in that group worked as developer evangelists for Bluemix which is what I wanted to do as well.

Pictures from Bluemix at DNUG  

By Niklas Heidloff | 6/4/16, 9:10 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

This week I attended DNUG in Hamburg/Germany. DNUG is the German user group for IBM Collaboration Solutions. In the app dev track several sessions covered Bluemix.

My Thoughts on the Next Generation of IBM Domino App Dev  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/16, 5:48 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Before I started to work on Bluemix I had worked 15 years in the IBM Collaboration Solutions space, especially on application development. Below are my personal thoughts on how app dev in IBM Domino could evolve, both on-premises and in the cloud.

How to build Line of Business Applications with Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/23/16, 2:14 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Tomorrow I’ll give a session at EngageUG with the title “Live on the Edge of Innovation with IBM Bluemix”. Bluemix is IBM’s innovation platform which supports developers to write new applications and functionality easily and fast without having to worry about infrastructure.

One Year of Bluemix.info  

By Niklas Heidloff | 12/1/15, 5:53 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

One year ago I launched Bluemix.info, a news aggregator for Bluemix developers. Over the last year I’ve published 1004 links to Bluemix related articles written by 279 people. Many Bluemix developers read Bluemix.info frequently, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback.

Visually develop REST APIs in Node and monitor them on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 10/7/15, 4:27 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last month IBM acquired StrongLoop, a company that provides functionality to power the API economy via Node in enterprises. Specifically StrongLoop provides capabilities to develop REST APIs in Node.js, access them easily from various clients including mobile apps and manage and monitor them in enterprises. Below is a high level description and some resources how you can use these features on IBM Bluemix.

IBM Bluemix for Administrators with Focus on XPages  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/22/15, 7:35 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Yesterday I attended AdminCamp which is a yearly conference for IBM Domino and IBM Connections administrators. I gave the opening session about IBM Bluemix administration with a focus on XPages. Here are the slides.

Invoking the Insights for Twitter Service in Bluemix from Swift  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/9/15, 2:43 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

"Hear the Buzz" is a sample iPhone app which finds tweets with positive or negative sentiments for certain topics via the IBM Insights for Twitter service in IBM Bluemix. Below is a short description how this service is used from Swift. As a starting point I used the sample app from my colleague Frederic Lavigne.

Hear the Buzz - iOS App using Twitter and Watson Services from IBM Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/8/15, 2:29 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

"Hear the Buzz" is a sample iPhone app which finds tweets with positive or negative sentiments for topics which users enter manually or via iOS speech recognition. The discovered list of tweets can be read or users can listen to them.

IBM MobileFirst Platform Server available as Trial on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/26/15, 3:23 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM Bluemix provides several services to build backend functionality for mobile iOS, Android and hybrid apps. There are mobile services to store data server and client side, to handle authentication, to send notifications, to monitor particular apps, ways for users to provide feedback and more.

Accessing Bluemix Services from Liberty Java Applications in Docker Containers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/25/15, 3:43 PM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM Bluemix allows developers to host their Docker images and to run their Docker containers in the cloud. In addition to hosting Docker in the cloud, Bluemix also provides more than 100 services that developers can use to build applications.

Deploying Docker Containers via Bluemix DevOps Pipelines  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/20/15, 1:03 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

In addition to the Docker and IBM Containers CLIs (command line interfaces) you can also use IBM Bluemix DevOps pipelines to build images and run containers on the server. DevOps pipelines have multiple stages. Usually in the first step you build your application code, for example via Maven for Java applications.

Deploying Web Applications generated by Yeoman on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/18/15, 7:17 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

My colleague Ryan Baxter pointed me to a nice tool to set up new web applications. The tool is called Yeoman, the "web's scaffolding tool for modern webapps". The tool helps especially developers who often create prototypes and first iterations of new projects.

Accessing On-Premises Data from XPages Applications on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/17/15, 3:12 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

When building new applications on the cloud, enterprises often need to access existing data that resides on-premises. Below is a high level description how to access data in on-premises XPages NoSQL databases from XPages applications running on IBM Bluemix.

Get started with Apache Spark on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/12/15, 6:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Recently IBM has added a beta version of the new Apache Spark service to IBM Bluemix. Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Performance benchmarks have shown that it can be up to 100 times faster than Hadoop.