APIs – Page 3 – RedThunder.Blog

Media Capture using Oracle Visual Builder for Facial Recognition App

Recently I built a Facial Recognition Mobile App using Oracle Visual Builder having set up the Facial recognition APIs using Tensorflow taking some inspiration from FaceNet. As highlighted above the app does the following: record a video of your face and send it to the API that generates various images and classifies them based on the label we provide at runtime. And in turn, invoke another API that is going to train the machine learning model to update the dataset with the new images and label provided. These two APIs will build a facial recognition Database. Once I have this, I can capture the face and compare that with the dataset I have captured earlier in my Facial recognition Database to output if the face exists in our system.

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License Plate Recognition Mobile App using Oracle Cloud Stack

Here is a quick cheat sheet if you ever wanted to build a mobile app that can take advantage of the camera built into the device, capture the vehicle or vehicles nameplate(s) in a frame and process that image and send it on API that can analyze the image and relay back the information it just scanned. This app can be extended to fulfil requirements like checking if the vehicle registration is up to date or insurance renewal is overdue etc. provided if there are APIs already available that can deliver this information.

So what is the tech involved in building this app?

To build a mobile app that can be deployed on iOS or Android, I used the Visual Builder service from the Oracle Cloud stack. This service provides the capability to build Web as well as Mobile applications through a declarative approach with the ability to introduce code for any complex requirements.
To store the captured image and use the image for downstream application purposes I used the Oracle Content & Experience service that comes with a rich set of APIs for content ingestion, public document link generation etc. From an enterprise architecture viewpoint, it makes sense to store the images with metadata in a content store, so I decided to archive the image using this service as part of the mobile app build process.
The most significant bit is to use a library / API that can process the image or OCR and send back the information we are interested n. For these purposes, I used the open source ALPR library. There are API’s available already if you want to fast track your app.
This one is optional. If you want to validate the information captured, we can set up a few API’s using the Oracle Autonomous Database with some data to complete the validation flow in the app.

This is what the Architecture would look like :

License Plate Recognition App Architecture.

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AUSOUG Connect 2018 – Talking Dev

In November 2018, I had the privilege to attend the Australian Oracle User Group national conference “#AUSOUG Connect” in Melbourne. My role was to have video interviews with as many of the speakers and exhibitors at the conference. Overall, 10 interviews over the course of the day, 90 mins of real footage, 34 short clips to share and plenty of hours reviewing and post-editing to capture the best parts.

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Teaching How to Invoke REST APIs from Oracle Visual Builder Web/Mobile Apps

In this blog, I am going to show you how to build a nice and simple UI with data coming from invoking REST APIs. All without code, but in just a few clicks.

I consider myself a good backend developer, good at making things functional, but I really struggle every time I need to produce nice UIs. However, using Oracle Visual Builder, I feel like I don’t have to be a UI developer or designer, I can very easily produce nice and friendly mobile UIs that consume my backend REST APIs. If you are like me, a backend programmer who loves API-first design approach, I’m sure that you will find this blog not only informative, but also refreshing.

This is a quick view of what we are going to achieve in this article:

First, we are going to auto-create Service controls in Oracle Visual Builder by pointing to existing REST APIs.
Then, we are going to use the out-of-the box widgets and components to build a simple, yet powerful UI that consumes such APIs.
Finally, we are going to publish the UI and test it across different media, e.g. Web on a laptop, mobile, tablets, etc.

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Using Public/Private Key Authentication for Oracle IDCS

In a recent blog post, I added a throwaway reference to the use of signed assertions as a better mechanism for interacting with the Oracle Identity Cloud Service REST APIs than the use of Client id/secret, though qualified it with ‘if you want to handle the additional complexity in your consuming client’. Reflecting upon this, I thought that perhaps it was worth trying to explain this ‘additional complexity’, since the use of signed assertions have a number of benefits; primarily that it does not require an exchange of sensitive information, as the private keys used to sign the assertion never need to leave the machine on which they are generated. In this blog post, I will delve deeper into what is required to leverage this authentication mechanism, for both clients and users.

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Building a Multi-Lingual Bot on the Oracle Chatbot Platform

First things first, if you are new to building Chatbot using the Oracle Cloud Platform, here are some quick videos to get you started on the platform and its capabilities. There is also an online MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) available on how to build your first BOT using the Oracle Platform and access the Bot through Facebook Channel.
Now that we understand how to build a bot let’s turn the Bot that can recognise the input from the end user conversing in his/her own language and respond accordingly.

The Bot platform allows you to bring your own translation keys (Google / Bing) and the Bot can be configured to detect the language. The bot further converts the user input to English, intent recognition by the NLP engine kicks off, based on the dialogue flow the bot structures the response in English which is again translated back into the language in which the question was asked by the user.

Let’s see that this in action :

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Teaching How to get Microservices to Consume Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP)

A few days ago, we published an article that shows how to provision and connect to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP). Based on this, we got multiple requests to also demonstrate how to extend the connection to the Autonomous DB, not only from SQL Developer, but also from polyglot microservices.

In this blog, we are going to take a step forward and create a simple “Hello World” NodeJS application that exposes some REST APIs that push and pull data using an Oracle Autonomous DB. The idea is to give you all knowledge required, to be start building your own microservices, consuming data from Autonomous DB.

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Building a Smart Contract with Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service @ #WinterHack2018

Last weekend, I was at the Code Network Winter Hackathon event in Brisbane – https://codenetwork.co/winter-hackathon-2018/. I was there as a sponsor, workshop presenter, mentor and just a general supporter. As such there was some down-time between different activities. So, what a great time to sit down and work on something that I have no idea about (technically) – #Blockchain and Hyperledger. So, as a normal person does – I went searching for relevant content to help. Here’s a couple of the searches that I did.

Unfortunately, through many different searches and reading lots of things it became apparent that I didn’t know much and there was lots to learn. There seemed to a massive amount information that looked great. There was content that talked about what a Blockchain is. There was content that talked about the business use cases and examples of why you use a Blockchain technology. There was code that built a Blockchain. I found plenty smart contract examples on github. I learnt more about what I needed to know but it didn’t get me to the place that I wanted to be.

So – how do I develop and play with a Smart Contract?

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Teaching How to Provision Oracle Autonomous API Platform and API Gateway

Oracle is adding a secret recipe to all their Cloud Services with a nice touch of Machine Learning. This makes it possible to have the new series of “Autonomous” Cloud Services that are self-driving, self-healing and self-securing. Stay tuned, because we are going to keep listening a lot about them.

In this blog I am going to show you how to provision an Autonomous API Platform environment and then provision and register an API Gateway, running on a separate Oracle Linux VM on IaaS.

This is a graphical view of what I will be doing in this blog:

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Invoking HTTPS Service Request from Oracle API Platform

Oracle API Platform’s API Implementation has two service naming convention 1) API Request 2) Service Request.

API Request – is the endpoint to which users or applications send requests for your API.

Service Request – is the URL at which your back-end service receives requests.

In this blog we are going to discuss what are the additional configuration we need to done inside API Platform Gateway Server while invoking a HTTPS Service Request URL.

Since, its HTTPS URL obviously there is associated SSL cert with that URL which is signed by Certificate Authority.

Recently, I have been doing one POC where I was invoking a Service Request HTTPS URL but it was not working and later found out it’s because of associated SSL certificate was not configured in Weblogic JKS Keystore.

Before, I get into detailed solution, let me tell you bit more about problem. At very initial stage when I tried creating an API which is in-turn calling an HTTPS service request, it was failing while invoking that service from rest POSTMAN tool and was getting “Internal Server error” as per below snap.