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 “conversational” 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.

Creating a Slack Bot

Brice McIver Articles, Conversational Apps, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js Leave a Comment

If you have ever worked on a team project, then you’ve needed some way to communicate with your team. For a very small team with all of its members based in one place, face-to-face communication might be your go-to method of handling project conversations.

However, once your project size progresses past that point, there’s a good chance that you’ll at least evaluate using a collaborative software package to help manage your project. Slack is a popular option for this.

In this blog, I’ll show the basic steps you can take to integrate Slack with your existing tools and workflows. In particular, we will set up Slack for incoming webhooks and event subscriptions, showing how to program a Slack bot to say personalized “Welcome to the channel” and a “Goodbye” messages.

Let’s get started…

Cobol to Java

Adventures In Modernization: Strategy + Example Converting COBOL To Java

Dallas Monson Articles, COBOL, Consulting, Development Technologies & Tools, DevOps, Java, Keyhole Creations, Modernization, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

We have consultants who specialize in moving old to new, renovating dilapidated code bases, and designing brighter futures for enterprises who have been vendor-locked for most of their existence. We have come across some repeated patterns and strategies for how to approach modernization of legacy systems. In this blog, we will cover a strategy that is very popular right now, Re-Platforming.

The basic flow of this post will be:

Introduction to Modernization
High-level definition of the Re-Platforming Strategy for Modernization
Sample of Re-Platforming using Keyhole Syntax Tree Transformer, COBOL –> Java
Additional thoughts on the value/risk of this strategy

Let’s get started…

Getting Started With JHipster, Part 3

Matt McCandless Angular, Articles, Java, JavaScript, JHipster Series, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial 1 Comment

Welcome back to this JHipster tutorial series! In part one we covered creating a monolithic application. In part two, we walked through creating a microservice application (which was a bit more complicated).

For those of you out there working to get things going with JHipster, there are some setup things and “gotchas” that I’d like to highlight. So this little blog is more of a helper for those of you who have decided to try JHipster out and play around with it. That’s what we’ll be discussing in this blog post with the hope that I can help you minimize the getting-up-to-speed curve…