How Watson, Bluemix, Cloudant, and XPages Can Work Together In

A Real World ApplicationFrank van der Linden, elstar IT

Full stack Java DeveloperDEV-1129

IBM Connect 2017 Conference

Me• Freelance Full stack Java developer

• Owner of elstar IT

• Curious of new technology

• IBM Champion 2013, 2014 and 2017

• Run (mountain) marathons

How do we proceed• HR Assistant

• Running it on IBM BlueMix

• Store it in Cloudant

• Analyse it with IBM Watson

• Show it with Charts

• Lessons learned

HR Assistant

Demo time

Frédéric Dehédin• At the time of the project: Senior Application

developer at Belsoft Collaboration AG

• @fdehedin

• http://www.fdehedin.ch/

Facts• Winner of the ICS Developer Competition 2016

• Runs on the XSP runtime on IBM BlueMix

• Store all the data in Cloudant

• Analyse jobs and job applications with IBM Watson

• Backend is pure Java, no Java Notes objects

Add ons• Cloudant connector OSGi plugin

• Take out the security issue

• Storing in and retrieving from Cloudant. JSON <—> POJO

• Can be accessed from Java backend.

• Do the heavy lifting. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Add ons• Jackson Mapper OSGi plugin

• Take out the security issue

• Used with the IBM Watson services

• Conversion of JSON to POJO

• Makes @Annotations available in Java back end

Roadmap

Running it on IBM BlueMix

Overview• BlueMix is IBM PaaS, with various services

• We picked a few services

Credentials

Deploy to IBM BlueMix• Fill the BlueMix Manifest file under

Application Configuration

• Will result in a yaml file

Deploy to IBM BlueMix• Set location of deployment

• Add shared-plugin folder

• Add the OSGi plugins

Deploy to IBM BlueMix• Deploy Application

Store it in Cloudant

What is Cloudant• It is the cloud version of CouchDb

• It is document based

• CouchDb is created by Damien Katz

• Cloudant is bought by IBM

• Is like MongoDb or NSF a NoSQL datastore

What is Cloudant• Data stored as JSON

• View and Search ‘formula’ defined in javascript

• Replication

• Tasks

• Build in API

• No annoying limitations

Cloudant database

Design document• Special type of document

• Holds javascript for View and FT Search definition.

• It is JSON everywhere.

• _rev and _id are reserved parameters.

• doc{}, is the actual data from application

Document

Attachment @ Cloudant• Stored as base64 encoded String

• Can be as standalone

• Or as part of Document (we choose this way)

• Store id as attachmentId, so it can be retrieved when needed

Attachment @ Cloudant• AttachmentDAO

Attachment @ Cloudant

• AttachmentController

• Convert upload to Attachment object

Attachment @ Cloudant

• ControllerBase

• All controllers can use these methods

Attachment @ Cloudant

• Servlet is called in application for download

• base64 data for the image tag

Analyse it with IBM Watson

Watson API explorer• Very useful to test input and see what is returned

Services we used• Tone analyser, to get the tone of the text

• Personality Insight, to determine the personality of the job applicant

• AlchemyLanguage, to get the keywords from the Job and Job application

tone analyser schema

Tone analyser• The same structure to call the Watson services

Tone analyser• ToneAnalyzerRequest contain the text to analyse

• ToneAnalyzerInjector gets text from model class

Tone analyser• Post the data to IBM Watson service (1)

• Convert the response back to Java class (2)

12

Tone analyser• ToneAnalyzerResponse holds the

results

• Use @annotations from Jackson to map JSON to properties

• Result is the source of the charts

Show it with charts

ChartJS• Open source HTML5 javascript based

• Responsive

• DataSets = Array of Objects

ChartJS• Factory to produce the chart data, accepts objects

• Factory set default Chart Type, like Radar or Bar

ChartJS

ChartJS• Custom control to display data

ChartJS• Custom control to display data.

Lessons learned

Lessons learned• No Single Sign On service on all datacenters

• Manifest yaml file and GIT are not an happy couple

• API’s are not consistent across Watson services

• Cloudant is a very reliable, flexible and fast NoSQL datastore

• IBM Watson services are really powerful.

Lessons learned• There is no RichText on the web, it is HTML

• Handling attachments on Cloudant was a challenge. Took some time get a robust solution.

• BTW the way, we won the competition ;-)

Questions

Resources• HR Assistant on BlueMix

•

https://hrassistant.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/

• HR Assistant code on GitHub•

https://github.com/flinden68/HR-Assistant

• IBM Watson services• https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

• IBM Cloudant documentation•

https://docs.cloudant.com/

• HR Assistant Demo•

https://youtu.be/yM5Foxn9Fvg

Resources• OSGi Cloudant connector

•

https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/cloudant-connector

• OSGi Jackson JSON Wrapper•

https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/jackson-json-mapper-plugin

• ChartJS• http://www.chartjs.org/

• Watson API Explorer• https://watson-api-explorer.mybluemix.net/

Reach out to me• @flinden68

• http://www.elstarit.nl

• flinden68@elstarit.nl

• https://nl.linkedin.com/in/flinden68