Archive for May, 2024

Using IBM Event Automation with watsonx

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024

In this post, I want to share examples of how watsonx can enhance the event processing flows you create using IBM Event Processing.

I’ll start by describing how Event Processing and watsonx complement each other.

Then I’ll share a couple of simple examples of what this looks like in action.

Finally, I’ll walkthrough how I built the example flows to show you how you can try doing something like this for yourself, and share tips for how to create flows like this.

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Using books data in Scratch

Sunday, May 19th, 2024

In this post, I want to share a Scratch extension that I’ve been working on today: enabling access to books data from the OpenLibrary API through new Scratch blocks.

Most of the work I do on Machine Learning for Kids involves adding machine learning models into Scratch. To enable students to create interesting projects, it also helps to make it easier to get external data into Scratch that they can use for training and classifying. A few examples of where I’ve done this in the past include creating Scratch blocks to access weather data, data from Spotify, and data from Wikipedia.

New blocks

The new blocks I’ve worked on today use the OpenLibrary API to enable access to information about books.

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Processing XML with Kafka Connect

Wednesday, May 15th, 2024

I spoke at Devoxx UK last week, about how to process XML data using a Kafka Connect pipeline.

This was based on some work I did last year, but it was good to get a chance to share it with a new audience.


youtu.be/NfYHE2i0-es

Processing Apache Avro-serialized messages from Kafka using IBM App Connect Enterprise

Monday, May 13th, 2024

IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) is a broker for developing and hosting high-throughput, high-scale integrations between a large number of applications and systems, including Apache Kafka.

In this post, I’ll describe how to use App Connect Enterprise to process Kafka messages that were serialized using Apache Avro schemas.

screenshot

This is an update to an earlier version of this post, reflecting updates to the sample code.

Background

Best practice when using Apache Kafka is to define Apache Avro schemas with a definition of the structure of your Kafka messages, and to store those schemas in a central registry that client applications can access at runtime.

If you want to use IBM App Connect Enterprise to develop and host integrations for processing those Kafka messages, you need App Connect to know how to:

  • retrieve the Avro schemas it needs using schema registry REST APIs
  • use the schemas to turn the binary stream of bytes on your Kafka topics into structured objects that ACE can manipulate and process

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