Weblog

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. 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 stores documents using standard JSON. It can be accessed using a standard HTTP REST API. ...

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. In the middle of writing code and need to launch an object storage service or a message queue for quick testing? The IBM Cloud CLI gets it done with a single command: ibmcloud resource service-instance-create. ...

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. This is essentially a server-less deployment which hosts your code as a standalone function (or series of inter-connected functions) in the cloud and executes it on demand in response to incoming requests, or at a pre-defined schedule. The key advantage here is there is almost no administrative overhead related to server hosting or maintenance, plus you can easily scale up (or down) the deployment as needed. ...

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. To make things easier, a Bluemix Continuous Delivery service was recently introduced, which comes tightly integrated with Bluemix out of the box and which provides a secure, automated way to build, test, and deploy 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. ...