Learn how we build the HR Assistant application on Bluemix and integrate Watson services

1. How Watson, Bluemix, Cloudant, and
XPages Can Work Together In A Real
World Application
Frank van der Linden, elstar IT
Full stack Java Developer
DEV03
Engage 2017

2. Me
• Freelance Full stack Java developer
• Owner of elstar IT
• Curious of new technology
• IBM Champion 2013, 2014 and 2017

3. 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
• The future

4. HR Assistant

6. Demo time

7. Frédéric Dehédin
• At the time of the project: Senior Application developer
at Belsoft Collaboration AG
• @fdehedin
• http://www.fdehedin.ch/

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. Roadmap

12. Running it on IBM Bluemix

13. Overview
• Bluemix is IBM PaaS, with various services
• The services we used.

14. Credentials

15. Deploy to IBM Bluemix
• Fill the Bluemix Manifest file under
Application Configuration
• Will result in a yaml file

16. Deploy to IBM Bluemix
• Set location of deployment
• Add shared-plugin folder
• Add the OSGi plugins

17. Deploy to IBM Bluemix
• Deploy Application

18. Store it in Cloudant

19. 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

20. What is Cloudant
• Data stored as JSON
• View and Search ‘formula’ defined in javascript
• Replication
• Tasks
• Build in API
• No annoying limitations

21. Cloudant database

22. Design document
• Special type of document
• Holds javascript for View and FT Search definition.

23. • It is JSON everywhere.
• _rev and _id are reserved parameters.
• doc{}, is the actual data from application
Document

24. 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

25. Attachment @ Cloudant
• AttachmentDAO

26. Attachment @ Cloudant
• AttachmentController
• Convert upload to Attachment
object

27. Attachment @ Cloudant
• ControllerBase
• All controllers can use these methods

28. Attachment @ Cloudant
• Servlet is called in application for download
• base64 data for the image tag

29. Analyse it with IBM Watson

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

31. 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 (now "Watson Natural Language Understanding”)

32. tone analyser schema

33. Tone analyser
• The same structure to call the Watson services

34. Tone analyser
• ToneAnalyzerRequest contain the text to analyse
• ToneAnalyzerInjector gets text from model class

35. Tone analyser
• Post the data to IBM Watson service (1)
• Convert the response back to Java class (2)
1
2

36. Tone analyser
• ToneAnalyzerResponse holds the results
• Use @annotations from Jackson to map
JSON to properties
• Result is the source of the charts

37. Show it with charts

38. ChartJS
• Open source HTML5 javascript based
• Responsive
• DataSets = Array of Objects

39. ChartJS
• Factory to produce the chart data, accepts objects
• Factory set default Chart Type, like Radar or Bar

40. ChartJS

41. ChartJS
• Custom control to display data

42. ChartJS
• Custom control to display data.

43. Lessons learned

44. 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.

45. 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 ;-)

46. The future

47. The future
• Move on as commercial service / solution (in progress)
• Let it work with Domino authentication (done)
• Change AlchemyLanguage service to Natural Language Understanding service.
(done)
• Add Document Conversion service (in progress)
• Add support for more NoSQL datastores (NSF done, MongoDb in progress)
• More to come…..

48. Questions

49. Resources
• HR Assistant on Bluemix
• https://hrassistant1.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

50. 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/

51. Reach out to me
• @flinden68
• http://www.elstarit.nl
• flinden68@elstarit.nl
• https://nl.linkedin.com/in/flinden68