About the Author
David Pitt

David Pitt

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David Pitt is a Sr. Solutions Architect and Managing Partner of Keyhole Software with nearly 37 years IT experience. Recent projects involve speaking, writing, and training developers in enterprise JavaScriptโ€‹/single-page applicationโ€‹ development best practicesโ€‹, as well as the development of GrokOla, the Q&A-based wiki softwareโ€‹ for development teams.โ€‹

OpenShift Quick Start: CLI

David Pitt Articles, Microservices, OpenShift, openshiftseries Leave a Comment

This post is a continuation of our hands-on OpenShift Quick Start blog series. In the first post we introduced OpenShift, and inย part two, you worked to get OpenShift running locally & adding a Container with an API service to a Pod. Make sure youโ€™ve completed that step prior to starting the continued exercise below!

The previous blogs in this series managed OpenShift using the web admin user interface. However, everything that can be done with the user interface can also be done from using the CLI (Command Line Interface). Arguably, developers prefer to interact with text commands, but thatโ€™s a generalization.

In this post, we’ll demonstrate common OpenShift commandsย can be done in the web admin from the command line.

OpenShift Quick Start

David Pitt Articles, AWS, Cloud, DevOps, Docker, Microservices, OpenShift, openshiftseries Leave a Comment

Our previous blog in the series introduced RedHatโ€™s OpenShift solution that provides a way for enterprise teams to implement their own PaaS. Essentially, it sits atop the Docker-based Kubernetes platform to provide a ready-to-use DevOps platform.

This blog introduces two hands-on exercises (taken from our OpenShift Course), that work to walk you through the following tasks:

– Installing OpenShift locally
– Adding a Container with an API service to a Pod

Unfortunately, it will take more than this quick start blog to get OpenShift installed and enabled in an enterprise. That said, developers, system admins, and any party that may be working on or responsible for the platform, will benefit from understanding how to get OpenShift up and running on a local machine as shown in this blog.

Could the Equifax Hack Have Been Prevented by a Microservices Architecture?

David Pitt Architecture, Articles, DevOps, Java, Microservices, Opinion, Security Leave a Comment

When I heard that the Struts Open Source framework played a role in the recent Equifax hack, I wanted to do some research to understand how it happened. Struts is a commonly-used Java framework that I have applied in the past. And Iโ€™m not alone in that: it is reported that in 65% of Fortune 500 companies currently implement Struts in some way.

So, I did a little digging and performed a thought experiment asking myself the following question: โ€œIf Equifax had a pure-play Microservices Architecture in place, would it have solved the problem?โ€

A Conversation About Conversations

David Pitt Articles, Conversational Apps, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Keyhole Creations, Mobile, Node.js, React Leave a Comment

We created a platform that supports developing a โ€œconversationalโ€ type application through SMS. The user experience between a user and an SMS application can be thought of as a conversation. A user texts a question or topic, and a reply is returned, then another question and reply is performed until a desired result is accomplished.

Now, this is not a universal user experience, but for many use cases it can provide an easy to deliver users functionality quickly and conveniently. There is no need to install or download apps, or pop open a browser and type in a URL; just have a conversation through your texting app.

In this blog: Why conversational applications are handy, examples of conversational applications we have created, and a walkthrough of the application architecture used to develop those SMS applications. Includes how to make texting a richer experience, state, and session handling insights.

My Reaction To React

David Pitt Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React, Tutorial 3 Comments

We at Keyhole have been helping our clients adopt JavaScript-based single-page applications for over five years. We have been impressed with the adoption and advancement of the ever-changing JavaScript ecosystem.

Server side, headless JavaScript (Node.js) has led to good tooling and packaging options along with server side remaining available. Additionally, the new ECMA6 standard has turned JavaScript into a viable general purpose programming language, that is arguably, on the same plane as C# or Java. It certainly has a large number of available frameworks and tooling options.

React differs from the other frameworks Iโ€™ve worked with in a handful of ways. In this blog, I will show tangible examples of Reactโ€™s unique features and capabilities, particularly how it handles HTML-based Components.