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I recently came across the IBM Watson Text to Speech service. This service, which is available under standard, premium and lite (restricted) plans on IBM Cloud, makes it quick and easy to transcribe speech from any application. It can be accessed using a standard HTTP REST API. With the IBM Cloud CLI, launching a new Text to Speech service on IBM Cloud is a simple two-step process: Create the service instance (read more about service instance creation)....

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to connect to an IBM Db2 database using PHP. However, PHP isn’t the only language with a native driver for IBM Db2. Another popular language with an IBM Db2 driver is Go…and coincidentally, that’s also the topic of this post. Install the IBM Db2 driver in your Go module as below: go get github.com/ibmdb/go_ibm_db As with other databases, you use the IBM Db2 driver for Go via the Go sql package, which provides a generic abstraction layer for database operations....

IBM Db2 is available as a fully-managed cloud RDBMS via IBM Cloud, or as a self-managed deployment via the IBM Db2 Community Edition. Regardless of how it’s deployed, you can access it either with a native-language driver or via its REST API. If you’re using PHP, a native driver is available as a PECL extension. Detailed installation instructions are available in the PHP IBM Db2 extension repository on GitHub. Once you have the extension installed, connecting to the database and executing queries is both fast and simple....

Both IBM Cloud Foundry and IBM Cloud Code Engine use a JSON-encoded environment variable to expose service bindings: VCAP_SERVICES for IBM Cloud Foundry and CE_SERVICES for IBM Cloud Code Engine. These variables provide important information, such as access credentials, API endpoints, key names and identifiers, which your application will need to connect to the corresponding services. If you’re using PHP, you can access this variable using the getenv() function. You can then decode it into either an associative array or an object and use it to initialize the corresponding service client....

I recently discovered an interesting feature of the IBM Cloud CLI: plugins. These plugins, which are usually linked to specific IBM Cloud services, add new commands and functions to the IBM Cloud CLI. The IBM Cloud CLI provides a simple interface to install, uninstall, update and search for plugins via the ibmcloud plugin command. To use a plugin, you must first install it with the ibmcloud plugin install command. Here’s an example:...

To access an IBM Cloud service instance, you must have an IAM access token. To obtain an IAM access token, you must have an API key for the service. Access tokens can be obtained directly from the IBM Cloud IAM service, by making an HTTP query to the API endpoint at https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token and including an API key in the request. Here’s an example: curl -X POST 'https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -d 'grant_type=urn:ibm:params:oauth:grant-type:apikey&apikey=YOUR-API-KEY-HERE' However, these access tokens are short-lived - typically, they expire after 60 minutes and need to be renewed after that expiry period....

IBM Cloudant is a fully-managed, distributed database that runs as a service on IBM Cloud. It is based on Apache CouchDB and the easiest way to access it is with an IBM Cloudant client library. As of this writing, IBM CLoudant client libraries are available for Node.js, Python, Go and Java. To illustrate how this works, I’ll provide a few examples of how to connect to, and use, an IBM Cloudant database service from Node....

IBM Cloudant is a fully-managed, distributed database that runs as a service on IBM Cloud. It is based on Apache CouchDB (although it is not open source itself) and can be accessed using a standard HTTP REST API. If you’re building an application that uses IBM Cloudant as a data store, this REST API makes it easy to interact with the database service from any language that has an HTTP client library, even if that language doesn’t have a native driver or SDK for IBM Cloudant....

A database in the cloud is a wonderful thing. It can serve as a secure, reliable and (most important) off-site data store for your application. It can also come in handy under different testing scenarios: for example, when you need to test an application refactor but can’t be bothered to spin up a database container locally, or when you’re trying to benchmark application performance under heavy load. A good example of a cloud-native database is IBM Cloudant....

To access an IBM Cloud service instance, you need service credentials. These credentials can be generated via the IBM Cloud Dashboard or the IBM Cloud CLI. My preferred approach is always to use the CLI, but it can be confusing the first few times you attempt it. Here’s a quick cheat sheet: Create the service instance (read more about service instance creation via the CLI). Here is an example of creating a Watson Tone Analyzer instance named myta:...

Most of the time, I use the IBM Cloud Dashboard with my browser to manage applications, instantiate services and check status. But sometimes, the point-and-click approach is just too slow. So, when I feel the need for speed, I switch over to the IBM Cloud CLI instead. This CLI, which is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, provides a full-featured alternative to the browser-based IBM Cloud Dashboard. The IBM Cloud CLI is particularly convenient for quick service instantiation....

If you’re building a small, single-purpose Web application and you want to run it in the cloud, the the typical option is to reach for a small cloud server from Amazon, Google or Azure. Those servers are relatively cheap to run and easy to deploy, but there’s an ongoing investment of time and effort required to keep them secure and updated. In many cases, a even easier solution is to run your application using a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform....

For people suffering from asthma, a peak flow meter makes it easy to monitor lung capacity and understand how changes in weather and season affect their condition. Typically, this information is stored as discrete readings in an “asthma diary”. The problem with a paper diary, though, is that as the number of readings increases, so does the difficulty of analyzing them in a holistic way. To make this easier, I decided to build a simple cloud application to both record meter readings electronically and provide visualization tools to make analysis as simple as a one-button click....

When I first started with this WordPress blog, I installed the Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) plugin to help me manage custom content types. Although this has been perfectly adequate for my needs, I’ve been looking to migrate over to the Pods plugin for a while now, if only because it seems to offer a bunch of additional features (relationships, a REST API…) and a nicer interface. And recently, when CCTM appeared to have crashed on me for a couple of days (turned out to be a stale cache), I decided to take the plunge....

Many, many years ago, I wrote an article about building a timesheet system to track and analyze work hours with PHP 4.x. It was a fairly useful little application, one that I ended up using quite a bit in my daily work as a consultant. As my requirements increased, I moved on to other project management systems…but I always had a soft spot for this, the one I used with my first few clients....

Continuous delivery is pretty awesome. There’s no fiddling about manually packaging or transferring code; instead, your code is automatically packaged and deployed on an ongoing basis, and you can see (and test) the results within a few minutes of making a change. Up until recently, if you were using Bluemix, you needed to rely on external or third-party services coupled with various custom scripts to implement continuous delivery for your Bluemix applications....

I’ll be speaking at the IBM Bluemix Dubai user group meeting next week. Using PHP with IBM Bluemix (Mon Aug 28 2017 at 19:00) This session covers the basics of developing and deploying PHP applications on IBM Bluemix. It will be based heavily on my experiences working with different IBM Bluemix services, which I’ve also described in various articles. It will include a hands-on coding demonstration that you can follow along with on your laptop....

I’ll be speaking at the IBM Cloud user group meeting in two days. Using PHP with IBM Bluemix (Sat Jul 29 2017 at 10:00) This session covers the basics of developing and deploying PHP applications on IBM Bluemix. It will be based heavily on my experiences working with different IBM Bluemix services, which I’ve also described in various articles. It will include a hands-on coding demonstration that you can follow along with on your laptop....

If you work as an independent recruiter or an in-house HR manager, you’re probably inundated with CVs from aspiring job candidates. You’re also probably collecting data from other sources: social media, LinkedIn profiles and your own interview notes. And the more data you collect, the harder it becomes to spot the right candidate for a particular requirement. If that sounds familiar to you, relax. There are better ways of matching job candidates with business needs, especially if you let technology help you....

At the end of every month, I sit down for a couple of hours to create and send out invoices to my customers. Up until very recently, this involved opening up an invoice template in a word processor, entering the date and invoice number, adding up the hours worked, and calculating the total and any taxes. I’d then export each invoice as a PDF and email it out. As if that wasn’t bad enough, at the end of each accounting year, I had to review a directory full of PDF files to calculate how much I’d earned, if any invoices were unpaid, and how many projects I’d completed....

Ever seen an injured stray on the side of the road and wished you could help, but didn’t know who to call? A couple of months ago, I started thinking about how technology could help address this problem. I began to imagine a mobile application which anyone could use to quickly report injured or ill strays to a central database, including photos and GPS locations. This information could then be used by rescue agencies dedicated to stray assistance....

Like most people, I send and receive a lot of documents over email, and the vast majority of those are in PDF format. Over the last few months, I’ve been playing with the idea of moving all these documents into a single location and building an application to automatically index them. This would not only make it easier to find a specific one quickly, but also simplify backing things ups....

I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with MongoLab’s DBaaS for a while…so when I had to choose a database for my latest IBM Bluemix application, MongoDB was first on my list. I like the idea of a document-oriented database as an alternative to the traditional RDBMS, and I was keen to try this in a real-world context. As it turned out, MongoDB’s document-oriented structure was a great fit for my idea of a fast, searchable, color-coded notepad in the cloud....

For many people, the Internet of Things is…well, the Next Big Thing. It’s all about using the cloud, real-time data, and new sensor technology to collect, store and analyze information from a wide range of previously-unwired sources: your house, your car, your refrigerator, your pet and so on. While IoT is certainly very exciting, it’s hard to figure out exactly how to get started building IoT applications…especially if you’re a Web developer without a background in electrical engineering (like me)....

Financial data is now more accessible than ever via open APIs. This makes it easy to build Web or mobile applications that let you track your investment portfolio on a minute-by-minute basis (or at least as often as you care to check it). That’s the idea behind my new portfolio tracking application, which lets you create a virtual portfolio of stocks and then shows you the current market value at any given point....

Cloud storage is increasingly popular because it’s cheap and scalable. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is probably the most well-known, but almost every serious cloud vendor now has a storage offering. Cue my research into IBM Bluemix and its Object Storage service, which lets you attach cloud storage to your Bluemix application. Bluemix’s Object Storage service is based on OpenStack Swift and follows Swift’s three-tier hierarchy for organizing data: accounts, containers and objects....

I’ve been using IBM Cloud (aka IBM Bluemix) for various projects, but one of the things that often frustrates me is the lack of debug information available. For example, it’s quite common to upload a new PHP application to IBM Cloud and then see a blank page when attempting to access it. The typical reason for this is that there’s a script error somewhere but the buildpack is configured to hide errors....

Google makes a number of APIs available for free - I’ve previously written about the Google Tasks API and the Google+ API. I recently came across another interesting one - the Google Places API. As the name suggests, the Google Places API lets you retrieve information about shops, businesses, and other establishments by location or keyword. The information returned by the API is quite detailed - it includes place names, place types, coordinates, addresses, opening hours, all coupled with a unique place ID....

If you’re a developer used to developing and testing applications locally, moving your code to the cloud can be a bit daunting. First, you have to choose a cloud from the numerous options availabe. Then, you need to deal with the nitty-gritties of pricing, provisioning, application deployment, scalability and security. And finally, you need to keep track of server performance, debug application issues and find ways to cost-efficiently improve performance....

I first came across PHPCR through my work with Magnolia CMS, an open source Java CMS. Magnolia CMS uses the Java Content Repository (JSR-283) as its content storage mechanism and PHPCR is a PHP adaptation of that standard. It’s great for storing semi-structured content in a hierarchical format and it also includes support for content versioning and indexing. The cool thing about PHPCR is that it lets PHP developers interact with content stored in a JCR-compliant content repository using PHP objects and APIs…no Java knowledge needed....

The Nutritionix API is an online API which lets you access a massive database of nutrition information, covering both generic and branded food items. I came across it recently when looking for something else, and was promptly diverted from my original goal into trying it out. While playing with it, it occurred to me that this could be the basis of a very neat little application to track calorie consumption. Ideally, it needed to work on a mobile device so that it would be at hand at meal-times, and be simple, interactive and easy to use....

I’ve been experimenting with IBM Bluemix for some time now and a few weeks ago, I decided to try hosting a custom REST API with it. I built the API using Bullet, a PHP micro-framework, then deployed it to Bluemix and connected it with Bluemix’s MySQL service. It worked out pretty well…as you can see by trying this live demo. In case you’re interested in learning how I went about building this, you can read all about it in this IBM developerWorks article....

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to Bluemix, IBM’s new cloud infrastructure platform for developers. With a bunch of pre-configured runtimes for Java, Node.js and Ruby, plus MongoDB, MySQL and various other database services, BlueMix provides a platform for quick app development and deployment. Bluemix is currently in beta and doesn’t support PHP (yet) but I found a blog post which suggested it was possible using the Zend Server PHP buildpack....

I’ve been working with Zend Framework 2 for a while now, trying to learn it and map its concepts to those from Zend Framework 1. One of the things that hasn’t changed is the framework’s support for security - it still has a bunch of useful components which let you protect your PHP application from SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, spam, and brute-force password hacking. You don’t need to be using Zend Framework either - the framework is loosely coupled, so you can use the components on a standalone basis....

I’ve been waiting to try out jQuery Mobile for a while and a few weeks ago, I finally got the chance. I hooked jQuery Mobile up with the Google Tasks API and built a simple to-do list application that works on tablet and smartphone browsers. The application exposes most of the basic functionality of Google Tasks, allowing you to add new to-do lists, create tasks, attach due dates and mark tasks as complete....

As promised, IBM developerWorks has now published the second part of my article on Sentry 2. In this concluding segment, I dive into the Sentry 2 permission model, explaining how to create groups, assign users and permissions to them, and use permission checks to selectively enable application functions. Also on the menu: find out how to harden your application with login throttling and temporary user deactivation, and integrate Sentry 2 with third-party authentication services like Google and Twitter....

If you build Web applications, there are a few things you can’t dodge coding: a user registration workflow, a password reset workflow, a login and logout system, and so on. Since these workflows aren’t likely to change much from one project to another, why not package them all up in a set of classes and use the time you save on something more constructive (blowing up some Protoss bases, maybe?)...

IBM developerWorks has just published my article on using Doctrine 2.3 with the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a well-known PHP Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool for querying and manipulating database content by using objects. It can be integrated with Zend Framework to inject database content into a PHP Web application. The article discusses how to create Doctrine entities and load and use them within Zend Framework 1.x and 2.x action controllers....

IBM developerWorks has published the second part of my article on integrating the Instagram API with a PHP application. This concluding segment examines Instagram’s OAuth support, demonstrates how to access protected Instagram feeds, and introduces two third-party PHP libraries that ease Instagram API access. Read the full article here.

IBM developerWorks has published my article on integrating the Instagram API with a PHP application. In case you didn’t already know, Instagram is a popular photo-sharing service that enables users to take photos with their smartphone and share them with others through the Web. The article examines the Instagram REST API in detail, using it with the Zend_Http_Client library to rapidly build and deploy PHP Web applications to search for and retrieve Instagram photos by tag, location and keyword....

IBM developerWorks has just published my article on creating REST applications with the Slim PHP micro-framework. Slim is one of the new breed of PHP micro-frameworks, inspired by Sinatra. It enables rapid web application development and prototyping without the performance overhead and learning curve of full-fledged frameworks. The article examines Slim in detail, using it to rapidly build and deploy a REST API with support for authentication and multiple request/response formats....

I’ll be speaking at the first meeting of the Mumbai MySQL/PHP User Group (MMPUG) tomorrow. High Performance XQuery Processing in PHP with Zorba (Wed Nov 27 2012 at 18:30) This session introduces the Zorba XQuery processor and PHP extension, and explains how to use it to add advanced XQuery processing to a PHP application. It will be based heavily on an article I’ve previously written for IBM developerWorks. If you’re in Mumbai tomorrow, please drop by, grab a cup of coffee and say hello!...

My article on using the PHP Content Repository (PHPCR) to interact with JCR content has just been published by php|architect magazine. PHPCR is an adaptation of the JCR standard which can be used to connect a PHP application with a JCR-compliant repository, such as the one used by the Java-based Magnolia CMS. The article explains how PHPCR makes it possible to build PHP applications that interact with content stored in Java/JCR-based products, without needing specialized Java knowledge or training....

The Open Source India conference is back for 2012. This year, it will run from Oct 12-14 in Bangalore. I’ll be presenting two sessions at the conference: Creating REST Applications with the Slim Micro-Framework (Sat Oct 13 2012 at 17:45) This session explains how to use the Slim PHP micro-framework to quickly deploy a REST API. It will also discuss how to implement common API requirements, such as authentication, request logging and multi-format support....

IBM developerWorks has just published my article on integrating the Google+ API with a PHP application. The Google+ API produces JSON output, which makes it easy for application developers to integrate into a Web application. Although the API is currently read-only, a number of interesting applications are still possible, especially when you consider the amount of content being added to the service daily. Read the full article here.