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.

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.ย 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.ย In particular, we will set up Slack for incoming webhooks and event subscriptions, showing how to program a Slack bot to say personalizedย “Welcome to the channel” and a “Goodbye” messages.

Let’s get started…

Got Swagger? (i.e. How I Got My Swagger on and How You Can Too)

Aaron Diffenderfer Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Most developers attempt to ignore and put off documentation as long as possible during the development process. However, the return on investmentย is worth the time and effort — far more than most of us realize.ย This is particularly true with API documentation.ย 

Working with a recent client, I had the opportunity to use Swagger to document APIs and provide structureย around the development process. During daily standups, I may have been known to say that my task for the day was to “get my Swagger on.”ย 

In this post, I want to walk you through my journey with Swagger along with general thoughts, tips, and tricks that I’ve learned along the way so that you too can “get your Swagger on.” Let’s get started…

OpenShift In Action Breakfast Boost Scheduled

Lauren Fournier Bogner Articles, Company News Leave a Comment

We are excited to announce the next free public Keyhole Software educational event: OpenShift In Action! This Breakfast Boost event is a live learning opportunity open to the public. The presentation is geared to benefit software developers who are implementing or interested in Microservices and OpenShift.

This free presentation will be held at the Keyhole Software office in Leawood, Kansas on Wednesday, June 28, 2017 from 8-10 a.m. Space is limited. To get more information and reserve your free tickets, please visit http://bit.ly/openshiftkc…

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.