Introducing Blue Cloud Mirror, a Fun IBM Cloud Showcase  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/23/19 11:15 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Blue Cloud Mirror is a game where players need to show five specific emotions and do five specific poses in two levels. The faster, the better. Play the game. It only takes a minute. All you need is a webcam and a Chrome browser.

My Thoughts on the Next Generation of IBM Domino App Dev  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/16 5:48 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Before I started to work on Bluemix I had worked 15 years in the IBM Collaboration Solutions space, especially on application development. Below are my personal thoughts on how app dev in IBM Domino could evolve, both on-premises and in the cloud.

How to build Line of Business Applications with Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/23/16 2:14 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Tomorrow I’ll give a session at EngageUG with the title “Live on the Edge of Innovation with IBM Bluemix”. Bluemix is IBM’s innovation platform which supports developers to write new applications and functionality easily and fast without having to worry about infrastructure.

Hear the Buzz - iOS App using Twitter and Watson Services from IBM Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/8/15 2:29 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

"Hear the Buzz" is a sample iPhone app which finds tweets with positive or negative sentiments for topics which users enter manually or via iOS speech recognition. The discovered list of tweets can be read or users can listen to them.

Get started with Apache Spark on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/12/15 6:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Recently IBM has added a beta version of the new Apache Spark service to IBM Bluemix. Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Performance benchmarks have shown that it can be up to 100 times faster than Hadoop.

Running Java Applications from Eclipse IDEs in Docker Liberty Containers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 8/11/15 6:40 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Before my vacation I blogged about the Docker tooling in Eclipse to build Liberty based images for Bluemix. This tooling helps to create images and containers including the applications which is the end result of what developers produce.

WebSocket Support in Java Applications on Bluemix via the Liberty Runtime  

By Niklas Heidloff | 7/9/15 1:44 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Since Liberty profile 8.5.5.4 you can use web sockets in your Java applications. This allows sending events from the server to web clients without having to poll the server. The blog describes this core functionality pretty well and comes with a short video and a sample application.

Globalize your Bluemix Applications without recompiling them  

By Niklas Heidloff | 6/23/15 7:03 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here is another short description of another awesome Bluemix service - IBM Globalization. This service provides machine translation capabilities from English to eight other languages at this point. The best feature is that you can change your strings dynamically without having to recompile and redeploy.

Cloud-based Data Refinery via the IBM DataWorks Service in Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 5/20/15 5:38 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here is another quick introduction to one of the cool services in IBM Bluemix - the DataWorks service that IBM announced at the end of last year. In order to leverage and analyze data from various sources and big amounts of data, data typically has to be cleansed and prepared first.

Bluemix Object Storage Service to store Files in the Cloud  

By Niklas Heidloff | 5/19/15 5:46 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM Bluemix provides object storage services to store and manage various types and large amounts of files by providing high-available, cloud-based storage that scales, is secure and cost-effective. The Bluemix services use SoftLayer Object Storage and make it easy to consume for Bluemix developers by provisioning accounts automatically when services are added to apps.

Static Security Analyzer Service for Java Applications in Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 5/18/15 3:31 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I just tried quickly a beta service in IBM Bluemix that was announced earlier this year. The Static Analyzer service helps finding potential vulnerabilities in your Java code like cross site scripting issues and missing encodings and displays the results in a report with descriptions and mitigation strategies.

Manage your APIs with the new IBM Bluemix Service  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/12/15 10:01 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

There has been and is a lot of talk about the API Economy. APIs provide new business opportunities for companies, new ways to provide services and new ways to sell and promote products. Watch the video from Sam Ramji for a great introduction to the API Economy. Here is how the IBM website describes API economy.

Secure Gateway Service to connect from Bluemix Apps to on-premises Systems  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/5/15 8:44 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

At InterConnect 2015 IBM announced the new Secure Gateway service which is now available on IBM Bluemix. "When you need a secure way to connect Bluemix applications to remote locations on-premises or in the cloud, use the Secure Gateway service. The Secure Gateway provides secure connectivity and establishes a tunnel between your Bluemix organization and the remote location that you want to connect to."

Slides and Screenshots of XPages on IBM Bluemix Presentation  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/4/15 8:09 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

Today I gave my second presentation at Entwicklercamp in Gelsenkirchen/Germany, a conference with 200 developers focussed on IBM Enterprise Social Solutions. In this session I covered the two previews IBM gave at IBM InterConnectED earlier this year in Orlando - XPages applications on Bluemix and the new Social File Sharing service based on IBM Connections.

Slides Introduction to IBM Bluemix for Java Developers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/3/15 7:07 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

I'm attending Entwicklercamp in Gelsenkirchen/Germany this week which is a conference with 200 developers focussed on IBM Enterprise Social Solutions. Today I gave my first session which was an introduction to Bluemix for Java developers. I described especially the parts IBM Enterprise Social Solutions developers might be interested in, for example new cognitive, mobile and Internet of Things services.

How Docker Containers relate to Cloud Foundry in IBM Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/20/15 11:17 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

IBM Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry, an open PaaS (platform as a service) to provide customers a choice of clouds. This PaaS model allows developers to focus almost exclusively on writing code since all infrastructure including the application servers are provided. This enables developers to build applications rapidly in local IDEs and push the applications to the cloud.

Bluemix to manipulate and share Objects in Virtual Reality  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/13/15 8:57 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

Last weekend the DeveloperWeek Hackathon took place where IBM hosted an IBM Bluemix Challenge. One of the winning projects was "CadSpace" which was developed by Aria Sabeti. “CadSpace enables you to manipulate objects in virtual reality, while sharing your vision in real-time with anyone in the world. One URL is all it takes to share visual ideas and get immediate feedback.

Bluemix and Watson find the healthiest and most affordable Spaces to live  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/11/15 11:48 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

Last weekend the DeveloperWeek Hackathon took place where IBM hosted an IBM Bluemix Challenge. The winner of our challenge was the project "Hedge (Housing Edge)" developed by Evan Pun, Dong-han Yao, Zachary Zeleznick, Emma Marriott, Jae Young Ryoo, Ryan Ma and Emily Le. "Hedge (Housing Edge) is a web application that helps a renter/buyer visualize healthy spaces and housing affordability in your community.

Use Watson and Bluemix to help visually impaired People  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/10/15 9:02 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

Last weekend the DeveloperWeek Hackathon took place where IBM hosted an IBM Bluemix Challenge. One of the winning projects was the project "Revealed" developed by Dmitry Golyshev and Kyoko Uchida. "Revealed is a web app that helps visually impaired people navigate better in the urban environments. By using visual recognition and text to speech IBM Bluemix technologies it recognizes the surrounding objects and read them aloud."

Third Party Services in IBM Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/5/15 1:26 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

Last week IBM previewed a new service for IBM Bluemix, called Social File Sharing. As some of my readers will know this is the work from my previous team, the IBM Connections app dev team, and I actually implemented the first version/prototype of the service broker. Since several people have asked me how to do this, let me give a quick overview.

Mobile Quality Assurance Service in Bluemix makes Mobile Developers more productive  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/3/15 1:34 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

One of the main benefits of IBM Bluemix is that it allows developers to be more productive and more innovative by providing infrastructure and services so that developers can focus on their specific requirements. A good example is the Mobile Quality Assurance service: "Use IBM Mobile Quality Assurance for Bluemix to discover and set up mobile quality services for your apps.

Authentication in Bluemix Applications via SAML Identity Providers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 2/2/15 5:06 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

At the beginning of this year the Single Sign On service in Bluemix was extended to support SAML as identity provider. This allows to leverage existing existing organization directories for authentication of users in the cloud.

Check out the Vaadin Boilerplate in Bluemix to build form-based Business Apps  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/29/15 8:44 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

This week I attended GWT.create in Munich which is hosted by the IBM partner Vaadin. I used the opportunity to learn a little about the Vaadin framework which has become very popular with a big community of developers. As I understand Vaadin is especially useful to build web based business applications with views and forms rapidly without having to write client side HTML and JavaScript code as described in the documentation.

Quick Demo of the new Social File Sharing Service in Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/28/15 12:31 PM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

At IBM ConnectED 2015 IBM announced and previewed a new service for IBM Bluemix, called Social File Sharing. The service allows storing and sharing files in the cloud and it helps users to find relevant files via social metadata, for example likes, tags, comments and the number of downloads.

IBM previewed XPages Applications running on Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/26/15 11:19 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

At IBM ConnectED 2015 IBM announced and previewed a new capability which allows developers to run XPages applications on IBM Bluemix. XPages is a web application development platform based on standards and common web development skills like Java, JSF and JavaScript. XPages applications run on IBM Domino which comes with a full stack of components to build applications rapidly.

What is Node-RED? How can be it used for the Internet of Things?  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/21/15 1:42 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

When I recently started to work on Bluemix, I was honestly a little confused about what Node-RED is, how it relates to the Node.js Bluemix runtime and how it relates to the Internet of Things service. Since some of my readers might be in the same situation, let me quickly try to explain. Node-RED is a visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things.

Meet IBM Bluemix at JavaLand in Germany  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/15/15 1:24 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

I'm happy that IBM will sponsor JavaLand which will take place from March 24th to March 26th. Not only are there great sessions, but the event also sounds like a lot of fun. It will occur in the theme park Phantasialand in Cologne. IBM will have a booth in the showcase where we'll demonstrate IBM Bluemix and we'll have several sessions. Ryan Baxter and I will attend the conference together with other colleagues.

Data Synchronization and Offline iOS Apps with IBM Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/14/15 1:30 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

One of the main benefits of IBM Notes is the ability to access applications when you're offline. There is a built-in replication functionality that takes care about data synchronization between clients and servers. I've always liked that capability since even today, for various reasons, people are not always online. Yesterday I played with a very similar feature - data synchronization and offline iOS apps with IBM Bluemix.

IBM Bluemix Keynote from David Barnes  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/13/15 3:11 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

IBM Bluemix Keynote from David Barnes. Last October at Pioneers Festival my colleague David Barnes presented IBM Bluemix in the keynote. Awesome presentation. I hope to see a keynote from David live this year :) David also created the famous first Bluemix video which has been viewed more than 30.000 times.

Internet Of Things Scenarios and Samples for Bluemix  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/7/15 6:18 AM | - | Added by Johnny Oldenburger

After I've implemented my own first Internet Of Things sample application, I've searched for other samples and scenarios. There is a whole lot of samples already available ranging from beginner-type of samples to actual scenarios providing great value. Below is a list of scenarios to give you some ideas how you can leverage the Internet Of Things and a list of samples to help you to get started.