OCI Arcade Gets A Revamp

Over the past couple of years, we’ve posted about the OCI Arcade. You can find the original article (here) and the repository (here). As part of the revamp, many things have changed and as such we’ve spent a little bit of time to make it better. Check out some of these new additions.

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!

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Disabling Hostname Validation in Nashorn Javascript

So, the other day I found myself having to connect to a server with self-signed SSL certificates while writing Nashorn Javascript. The precise details of how I found myself in this situation are pretty unimportant (I was re-writing an ant build script which had to obtain a build parameter by querying a running instance of a server in dev…), but the problem was suitably esoteric that I couldn’t find a code snippet with a quick search, while probably not being so esoteric that I am the only one who will ever need this, and hence, this post.

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Teaching best practices to Design, Build, Secure and Monitor APIs

In this blog, I want to share my experience after having created many APIs using different approaches and technologies. I am going to encapsulate a simple process that will help you construct APIs, starting from scratch with an idea or requirement and move it all along to a happy consumption.

The best part of APIs is that they are microservices enablers, which implies that they are not technology prescriptive, so in this blog you will see that your APIs can be implemented using any technology or programming language.

I decided to use “Jokes” as the vehicle to explain the APIs construction best practices, mainly because jokes are a simple concept that anyone can relate to, but also because I want you to feel compelled to consume these APIs and by doing so, get a laugh or two.

My original idea with jokes is to:

Get a random joke.
Translate the joke to any language.
Share the original or the translated joke with a friend via SMS.

This is the high-level view of how our end solution will look like:

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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.

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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.

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Continuous Build of Docker Containers using Docker hub

In the previous article, I mentioned how we can Dockerise a progressive framework based application (Vue). I have made few improvements to the application where I am now able to perform CRUD operations on the client side using AXIOS, based on API’s available from the server side. I wanted to test these incremental features added to the application and imagine executing those docker commands everytime you make a new component/feature available. This is quite a task. So I was looking at ways to automate the task where every time I commit/push the code to GitHub the build happens automatically so that the latest container is ready for deployment. This is where Docker Hub comes to our rescue. Here are the steps for the automated build process:

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Dockerising a Vue.js based SPA, ship and run on Oracle Container Cloud Service

In this post, I am going to show how to build and containerize a Vue.js application and let it run on Container Cloud Service (OCCS) using the following steps: