Visual Builder Cloud Service – Dynamic Elements

I’ve been using VBCS for awhile now and it has really evolved over the past nine months. I guess that’s one of the wonderful things about these PaaS offerings from Oracle; we don’t have to wait so long for new features and capabilities.

One thing I wanted to do, but it isn’t directly supported in VBCS yet, is to have dynamic displays. I’ve done quite a bit of programming in native JavaScript and Oracle JET where I’ve used web sockets to make my graphs and gauges change automatically without the need for a refresh button.

Well, I figured out a way to do this in VBCS. Now I will admit right away, this is pretty ugly, so if you are a software development purist, please turn off your TV now!

Continue reading “Visual Builder Cloud Service – Dynamic Elements”

Oracle MFT – OIC Integration

Even in a day and age where event-based and real-time data exchange is prevalent and growing, the truth is there are still massive amounts of data exchanged using file transfer mechanisms. Oracle has always played in this realm, but with limited success. The Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) application is pretty good, but nothing to write home about… or write a blog about! 😀

One reason is because moving files around and using FTP servers is not very glamorous. Another reason is because the Oracle MFT management dashboard is pretty limited. It is able to monitor various aspects of a file transfer, report success or failure and allow you to resend files. But it has no business context or the ability to understand how a file might be part of a larger business process.

Selection_341

Continue reading “Oracle MFT – OIC Integration”

REST Enable Anything?

I think I’m living in a strange world. With all the technology swirling around my head I find myself asking, “I wonder if I could REST enable that” or “I wonder if I could automate that device with micro services.” Yes, I am crazy!!!

Case and point: I bought my six-year-old son a remote control digger. It wasn’t terribly expensive, but it was also not terribly good. The remote control was cumbersome and it couldn’t do very much. The “I wonder if I could automate that” in me decided to make a few modifications. That led to a few more modifications…. The final result was a pretty cool remote control digger!

I mention it here on this blog because I also asked the question “I wonder if I could REST enable that” too. Yes… yes I can. What am I going to do with that? I have no idea. I have grand ideas of being able to say, “Alexa, dig a swimming pool in the back yard” followed by the wonderful Alexa reply, “Ok.”

Here is a link to all the details on this project in case anyone would like to do something similar.

http://convert-rc.blogspot.com.au/2017/12/digger-ps3-convert.html

Thanks for reading.

-John

How to Customise (reskin) API Platform Developer Portal

Information is power and monetisation of data is a common theme in the corporate world today. One of the common use-cases for the API Platform is to leverage corporate services and data and provide it to a broader internal and external development community. Control is kept in-house through security, policies, throttling, etc, but it dramatically increases the pool of developers working with our services.

API Platform is a great tool for this, but if I’m going to expose services to a developer community, I don’t really want to have an Oracle branded developer portal exposed.

fortunately, rebranding the developer portal is as easy as one, two, three! Continue reading “How to Customise (reskin) API Platform Developer Portal”

Oracle IoT – Working with Bosch Devices

How to use the Bosch XDK with the Oracle IoT cloud service.

Introduction

As I continue to work with various IoT vendors to see how they could be used with the Oracle IoT cloud service, I came across one of these nice little Bosch XDK kits.

bosch-xdk

This is a demo kit to show off the many Bosch sensors available and give people an environment for prototyping. Here are some of the built-in sensors: XDK Sensors

The device has built-in wifi and Bluetooth LE.

My goal was to get this to periodically send sensor data into the IoT cloud service and make it easy for others to do the same.

Continue reading “Oracle IoT – Working with Bosch Devices”

Oracle IoT – Working with Sigfox/Thinxtra Devices

How to use the Thinxtra devices and Sigfox network with the Oracle IoT cloud service.

Introduction

There are lots of activities happening today in the world of IoT (Internet of Things). The market is growing at a staggering pace. Oracle, of course, is providing services in this area, mainly to support our many great SaaS applications. Almost every application can benefit from data coming from devices on machines, automobiles, medical devices, human wearables and such. However, there are several issues people face:

How to work with all the various devices.
How to manage the devices and information.
How to integrate these with other systems in the enterprise.
Deployment of devices, configuration, maintenance, versions, upgrades, Etc.

Oracle IoT Cloud service is designed to help with these issues, but it is often overwhelming to get a given device’s data initially into the IoT cloud. Case and point is with the wonderful devices from Thinxtra which uses the Sigfox network.

Continue reading “Oracle IoT – Working with Sigfox/Thinxtra Devices”

The “hidden” IaaS Capability

Oracle is moving fast in the IaaS world.

I’ve been using the Oracle Cloud IaaS service for quite some time now. I spin up various forms of OEL or Ubuntu and deploy applications on top.

But did you know there are many ways to spin up common platforms on top of IaaS with no installation required? Bitnami is one option, but there is a “hidden” menu item that few people know about and I want to share that with you now.

Continue reading “The “hidden” IaaS Capability”

OSB to API Platform

As a follow-on to my previous blog entry “ICS to API Platform,” I wanted to also show how a similar thing could be done for Oracle Service Bus (OSB).

The 12c release of OSB added many new capabilities to support REST services and execute REST services. It also has automatic conversions between JSON and XML payloads making it very easy to expose existing webservices to REST/JSON based services. It is also easy to consume REST/JSON services and use them just as if they were webservices.

Continue reading “OSB to API Platform”

ICS to API Platform

I’ve been using the API Platform and Integration Cloud Service (ICS) for some time now. Independently, they are powerful products but together they are even better.

Initially, most ICS use cases were SaaS to SaaS or an extension to an existing SaaS. But more and more I’m seeing people use ICS in place of a standard service bus to do basic validation, enrichment, transformation and routing.

But how do you expose these ICS services using standard API methods? Well, it isn’t too difficult to go into API Platform and define an API to point to the ICS service, but this could be quite tedious.

Luckily, all the Oracle products have an “API first” strategy, so it wasn’t too difficult to setup an ICS flow to automatically publish new services into the API Platform.

Continue reading “ICS to API Platform”