Quick Introduction to the Computer Vision API

Brad Kirtley .NET, API Development, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Machine Learning, Tutorial 1 Comment

Machine learning is a hot topic these days because the biggest tech companies are focused on taking this technology to a new level. For instance, to help develop autonomous driving cars, better interaction between you and your house with products like the Amazon Echo.

Machine learning is a core sub-area of artificial intelligence. Machine learning enables computers to self-learn without being explicitly programmed. As new data comes available, the computer has the ability to learn, grow, change, and develop itself to make better decision in the future. This technology will help reduce the workload and possible incorrect diagnoses when radiologist read films, reducing the amount of accidents on our highways caused by human error, possible reduction of inappropriate message / images / videos from bullying on social network sites.

This article will touch on one of the many Artificial Intelligence APIโ€™s that Microsoft has built for public consumption. We will specifically focus on the step-by-step process of uploading a picture, passing that picture onto the Microsoft Cognitive Services – Computer Vision API, and retrieving different attributes about that image. This is an aspect of AI technology that companies like Facebook & Google are using to try to stop bullying and other issue within social networking. Let’s get started…

Creating A Custom Amazon Alexa Skill

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Articles, Azure, Conversational Apps, Programming, Tutorial 1 Comment

With the explosion of the internet of things (IoT), many companies are competing to create the best smart home ecosystem for consumers.

Amazon Echo, for instance, is a robust system that allows the user to interact with their smart devices via voice command. Alexa is the application that the Echo communicates with, essentially the brain of the Amazon Echo. It controls how your Amazon Echo communicates with your other smart devices and services. It can sync with a variety of smart devices including switches, thermostats, garage doors, sprinklers, door locks, music streamers, news outlets, and more. It alsoย allows the third-party companies to create custom skills which are then accessible through the Amazon Echo.

In this blog I willย discuss the Amazon Echo and its Alexa application. We will go through the process to create a custom Alexa skill about the Keyhole blog, paying particular attention to keywords you’ll need to understand when you create your own Skill. From there, we’ll show how to test a Skill via simulators and deploy it to your Amazon Echo.

Auto-Publishing & Monitoring APIs With Spring Boot

David Pitt API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Keyhole Creations, Microservices, REST, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

If you are heading down the path of a Microservices style of architecture, one tenant you will need to embrace is automation. Many moving parts are introduced with this style of architecture. If successful, your environment will have a plethora of service APIs available that the enterprise can consume for application development and integration.

This means that there must be a way that available API documentation can be discovered. API information needs to be effectively communicated throughout the enterprise that shows where APIs are used, how often APIs are used, and when APIs change. Not having this type of monitoring in place will hinder and possibly cripple the agility benefits that a Microservice style of architecture can bring to the enterprise.

This blog will describe how Swagger/OpenAPI documentation can be applied to aย Spring Boot implementation. We will show how API documentation and monitoring can be automatically published toย an API documentation portal.

As an example, we introduce a reference Spring Boot API CRUD application (using Spring MVC/Data with Spring Fox) and set up the automatic publishing of API documentation and statistics to documentation portal GrokOla. In the example, we introduce two open source utilitiesย to help and allow published APIs the ability toย be searched and notify users whenย changed….

Getting Started With Ionic 2

Adam Costenbader Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile, Tutorial, TypeScript Leave a Comment

Everyone wants to have an “App” to represent them, their company, or just to perform some common task they might have in mind.

The problem with this is that there is so much to mobile app development. iPhone apps require that you have a Mac to compile them. Android apps have to deal with platform fragmentation. iPhone apps can mean working with Objective C, Android can mean Java– and if you aren’t a polyglot and fluent both these languages, you probably feel that mobile app development is quite the daunting task.

Luckily, though, there are other options to choose from – like the Ionic 2 framework. In this blog, we’ll show just how easy it is to get up and running with Ionic 2 by creating a reference mobile application. By the end of this blog, our application will have the ability to run in the browser, emulator, or be built-out to run on a device.

Taking A Mixed Approach To Single-Page Applications

Chris Berry Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Single-Page Application Leave a Comment

A coworker came to me with a problem. The client he was working with would be building hundreds of single-page applications and all would need to be tied into a single shell application. He had first attempted to use an iFrame contained within another single-page application to display the child applications.

While this worked, he came up against another requirement: the child applications may or may not need access to data from the parent shell application.

It was at this point he came to me for suggestions. I had been playing with this exact idea for sometime; how can you manage a collection of Single-Page Applications and still share data between them?

At this point, I decided to create a hybrid solution of mixing Single-Page Applications with a server-rendered shell application. The following is the process I took for creating this solution, highlighting some of the pain points with some suggestions for further enhancements.