| June 2021 Edition Oracle Developer Partner Community Newsletter |
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| Learn how to create new service offerings and solutions for Oracle SaaS solution based on the Oracle Cloud Platform |
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| Dear Developer Partner Community, |
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Thanks for the joint business in fiscal year 2021, June 1st starts the New Year for Oracle. Partners play a key role for Oracle integration and digital assistant. 8 of the top 10 Oracle Integration customers are implemented by partners. SaaS solutions like HCM, CX and ERP Cloud need to be integrated and customized. Attend the SaaS Innovation Webcast with Suhas Uliyar, Vice President Oracle Product Management, July 8th 2021. Want to increase the Oracle PaaS business? Create new service offerings and solutions for the Cloud? Attend the PaaS Overview Webcast July 6th 2021. Martijn Vlek, Vice President will present the latest PaaS sales plays, kits and how to get access to the Oracle Cloud platform.
What are AI Chatbots and How Do They Work? Artificial intelligence chatbots are text- or voice-based interfaces that provide support and connect human users with the services or information they need by simulating a traditional person-to-person conversation.
In the Application Development section Clay announced the ARM based Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offering. Helidon, a collection of Java libraries for writing microservices, supports now Vault and Neo4j. |
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| For a short summary of our monthly key information watch the PaaS Partner Updates on YouTube. The June edition highlights Connect & Innovate SaaS & Platform Launch Webcasts and the Hands-on Integration Bootcamps. |
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| In this month’s community webcast Shay Shmelzer will present an Oracle Visual Builder update and how partners can leverage the used by Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Cloud Apps to extend SaaS and build customer solutions. Please join the Partner Community Webcast June 29th 2021. On-demand webcast recordings are available at the Oracle Video Hub. |
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| Connect, Innovate & Extend SaaS Partner Launch July 8th 2021 |
| Join our Launch Webcast |
Want to increase the Oracle Cloud business? Create new service offerings and solutions for HCM, ERP & CX based on the Oracle Cloud Platform?
Attend this webcast with Suhas Uliyar, Vice President Oracle Product Management.
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SaaS solutions like HCM, CX and ERP Cloud need to be integrated and customized:
Speaker: Suhas Uliyar Vice President Product Management Digital Assistant, AI & Integration Oracle HQ
Schedule: July 8th, 2021, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (GMT-08:00)
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| Oracle Cloud Platform Partner Launch July 6th 2021 |
| Join our Launch Webcast |
Want to increase your Oracle Cloud Platform business? Want to create new service offerings and solutions for the Cloud?
Attend this webcast with Martijn Vlek, Vice President Oracle EMEA! |
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Content:
- Cloud Platform update
- Sales Plays & Cheat Sheets
- Customer presentations & demos & free trials
- Partner resources & support
Speaker: Martijn Vlek, Vice President Oracle EMEA
Schedule: July 6th, 2021, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CEST (GMT+2)
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| On-Demand Chatbot Introduction and Hands-on Workshop |
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Want to get started with Chatbots? Attend the introduction and hands-on workshops with Oracle Digital Assistant:
• Digital Assistant Overview & start your free cloud service
• Hands-on Digital Assistant part 1
• Hands-on Digital Assistant part 2
• Best practices in building an AWESOME digital assistant experience
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| Oracle Visual Builder What’s New |
| Partner Community Webcast June 29th 2021 |
| Learn how you can leverage the Visual Builder Platform - used by Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Cloud Apps – to develop your own solutions and to extend Oracle’s Apps too. In this session we’ll explain the new platform architecture, show a full development lifecycle demo, and discuss the new features added in the latest release. |
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See the platform that Oracle relies on for our own business and learn how it can benefit your business.
Speaker: Shay Shmeltzer
Schedule: June 29th, 2021, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CET (Berlin time) |
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| Cloud Platform Partner YouTube Update June 2021 |
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The June video includes three topics:
• Connect & Innovate SaaS and Platform Launch Webcasts
• Hands-on Integration Bootcamps
• Visual Builder What’s New
For regular updates please subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Thanks for your likes and sharing the video on YouTube and LinkedIn.
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| Become a Certified Oracle Expert |
| Enablement & certification is key to cloud success |
At the Oracle Competence Center and Online Learning Library partners can attend free on-line classes and certifications. Additional we offer the latest implementation exams ($245 or free vouchers) for:
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| Resources Developer Partner Community |
| Oracle Digital Assistant |
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What are AI Chatbots and How Do They Work?
Artificial intelligence chatbots are text- or voice-based interfaces that provide support and connect human users with the services or information they need by simulating a traditional person-to-person conversation.
Text-based chatbots are often deployed online on websites and social media platforms to provide customer support and outreach. Voice-based chatbots, on the other hand, are most typically used for call deflection and sorting or over-the-phone customer service. Most smartphones come equipped with a built-in chatbot, and smart speakers with chatbot functionality have been trendy gift-giving items for several years.
How Do Chatbots Work?
The most typical chatbot interaction occurs on a business site. These customer service bots usually pop up after a human user navigates around a site for a few minutes or exhibits behaviors that show that they have become “lost” or are having trouble connecting with the information they need. Once the chatbot window presents itself, the user can enter their question in plain, syntactical English. The bot’s language recognition functions break down the question and, at the speed of light, compares the query to its data bank of previously asked questions to look for ways customers have achieved satisfying results in similar situations. When that search is complete, the chatbot shares the best and most relevant information with the user.
Learning Entity Event Handler Programming by Example of Building an Expense Report Skill by Frank Nimphius
In previous articles I promoted the trinity of Composite Bag Entities (CBE), Entity Event Handler (EEH), and the System.ResolveEntities (RE) component as the (new) go-to technique for building model-driven conversations in Oracle Digital Assistant. Entity event handlers are called in the context of resolving composite bag entities, which allows you to influence the flow of conversations, but also how entities extract information from user messages.
In this article, I provide a Expense Report Skill (ZIP) that uses two composite bag entities and two entity event handlers to help users submit an expense report with one or many expense items. I am sharing this sample to provide you with entity event handler sample code that you can use to learn from.
Note: I developed the skill reporting example for an Oracle Digital Assistant Design Camp session about Entity Event Handler. So, if you are new to the topic of entity event handler, please pause here and watch this video first.
Entity Event Handler Expense Report Sample In Action
Let's start with how the demo performs at runtime to highlight areas that you find coded in an Entity Event Handler. The sample application is a simple version of an expense skill that follows the old traditional way of creating an expense report first to then add expense items to it. Let's start with how the demo behaves at runtime to highlight areas that you can find coded in an entity event handler. The sample application is a simple version of an expense skill that follows the old traditional method of first creating an expense report and then adding expense lines.
Oracle Digital Assistant Design Camp: Testing Strategies by Frank Nimphius
How well is your digital assistant performing? How smart is it? Is it getting smarter? The only way you know is by observing, measuring and testing.
In this design camp we will dive into some of the strategies for proving the worth of your digital assistant: from the NLP to the custom components to the conversations themselves. We will show you specific testing strategies to ensure the bot correctly understands natural language - and also ensure that it doesn't incorrectly resolved phrases which are out of domain, or are intended for different skills.
We will demo some of the best practices we have implemented in Artie where we can verify NLP changes through 180 THOUSANDS tests which run automatically whilst we grab a coffee! An then you'll see how we can do "what if" analysis on how to best define your confidence thresholds.
We'll also take a dip into some of the new features of ODA to add more power to your testing strategies.
Building A Frequently Asked Question Skill Using A Programming By Convention Approach by Frank Nimphius
The concept of convention over configuration as a paradigm in framework development to facilitate the decisions developers must make, can be implemented in Oracle Digital Assistant to build skills that answer frequently asked questions.
This article explains how to create frequently asked question chatbots (skills) without coding by following a set of naming convention rules.
The starting point of this approach is a skill template sample that I provide at the end of this article. The skill contains all of the dialog flow coding required to make this work.
Note: This article does not explain how the provided skill template works but how to use the template for building custom Frequently Asked Questions skill bots. To understand how the template, and thus the "programming by convention" implementation works, please read the commends added to the BotML in the dialog flow.
About Building A Frequently Asked Questions Skill
Oracle Digital Assistant provides answer intent and regular intent to create chatbots that answer frequently asked questions.
Creating Multi - Select User Interfaces For Data Stored In Array Variables by Frank Nimphius
Most messengers used with chatbots do not support multi-select lists as a widget for building user interface. In a previous Oracle TechExchange article, I discussed how, using Oracle Digital Assistant, you can still implement multi-select lists for data stored in value list entities (https://blogs.oracle.com/mobile/techexchange-quicktip%3a-creating-multi-select-lists-in-oracle-digital-assistant). In this article, I will explain how you can do the same for values that are not entity based but queried from a backend service.
How a multi-select value list looks in Oracle Digital Assistant
The screenshot below shows the example I created and demonstrated in the previous article. The list of values was created from a list of values entity that has been configured to accept multiple values entered by a user. At runtime, users could then use the index numbers, or the labels, in front of the choices to select one or many items (see how the selection of cheese, garlic and oil are reflected in the order confirmation).
Display Web View Forms in Oracle Web Messenger for Structured or Secret Data Entry by Frank Nimphius
Below are 3 examples for use cases that benefit from structured data entry in a chatbot conversation.
• Sensitive information such as credit card numbers that should not be displayed in the messenger's conversation history.
• For users to enter or edit a large amount of information that otherwise would result in very long chatbot conversations
• When the messenger does not provide convenient user interface to guide users (e.g. a calendar picker or dependent list-of-values)
Oracle Digital Assistant supports locally and remotely deployed web forms. For the Oracle Web SDK (Oracle web messenger), the web view can be displayed in a separate browser tab or integrated into the messenger so that users are not taken out of context. In this article I explain how you display web forms in the web messenger and also provide a sample that displays a Oracle JET10 based login form.
The Sample at Runtime
After importing the provided Oracle Digital Assistant skill and configuring Oracle Web Messenger, you can test the sample by starting the index.html file in a browser. Then open the messenger window by clicking the bot icon. A welcome message is displayed with the instructions shown in the image below.
Introduction to JET Dynamic Components in Visual Builder by Shay Shmeltzer
Oracle JET's Dynamic Components are now available in Oracle Visual Builder's components exchange. These components help you develop user interfaces that dynamically change what content is shown and how it is presented based on rules that you define. In this blog we'll give you a quick introduction to these components.
Basic Concepts
The dynamic components use rules that you define to decide which data to show and how to show it. They provide a great solution for cases where you need to render different content based on some conditions in your app.
The rules that you define use built in variables that refer to the context the component is rendered in. For example, you can check the size of the device accessing your app, or information about the user using the app such as their role or email. In addition, you can define your own variables for the components' context. Based on the conditions you decide which pieces of information to show - for example selecting a different sets of fields to show depending on whether the app is accessed from a large screen or a mobile device.
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Arm for Developers
Oracle Ampere A1 Compute is a high-performance platform combining Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Ampere Altra Arm processors. It provides deterministic performance, proven security, and a broad developer ecosystem that includes popular tools and environments (OS, Kubernetes - OKE , SDKs and CLIs).
Building Applications with OCI Arm compute shapes is free to try, easy to learn, and fast to explore. Developers can count on a broad community of developers and partners including Jenkins, Gitlab, GitHub, NGINX, Rancher and several others. Developers can get started quickly with the Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image.
Helidon Integration with Vault by Tomas Langer
HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Vault is a commonly used Vault in many microservices. The APIs are REST-based and Helidon implements them using reactive client.
Helidon integration with HCP Vault is still experimental and not intended for production use. APIs and features have not yet been fully tested and are subject to change.
Vault integration supports the following features:
• Secret Engines
Key/Value version 2, Key/Value version 1, Cubbyhole, PKI, Transit, Database
• Authentication Methods
Token, Kubernetes (k8s), AppRole
• Other Sys Operations and Configurations
Enabling and disabling secret engines and authentication methods
Each of these features is implemented as a separate module, with the Vault class binding them together. In Helidon MP, with injection, this binding is done automatically, and you can simply inject your favorite secret engine.
Helidon and Neo4j by Mitia Alexandrov
The idea to experiment with integrating Neo4j with Helidon came quite naturally.
Neo4j is a graph database management system developed by Neo4j, Inc. It is an ACID-compliant transactional database with native graph storage and processing. Neo4j is available in a GPL3-licensed open-source “community edition”. (Wikipedia, Retrieved 2021–02–25)
Neo4j is implemented in Java and accessible from software written in other languages using the Cypher query language through a transactional HTTP endpoint, or through the binary “bolt” protocol.
Neo4j is now the de facto standard for graph databases used by many industries.
It all started with a small chat with Michael Simons, one of the authors of Spring Data Neo4j 6 and the maintainer of Neo4j-OGM. We asked Michael his thoughts on how Helidon and Neo4J could work together. In less than an hour, Michael sent me a link to this repository with a fully functional example for Helidon MP and Neo4j SDN.
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| Additional new material Developer Community |
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| Training Calendar |
| For the latest trainings please visit our Training Wiki. |
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| Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups |
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Want to learn more about developing Enterprise-grade Cloud Native applications on the Oracle Cloud Platform, covering topics like Microservices Architecture, developing in Node, Python and PHP, using Low Code development tools to build Mobile apps, and much more?
Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups if you want to follow Oracle’s solutions in this area, or participate in the events and hands-on labs we organize:
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| As an Oracle speaker, he approved the presentation from Jean Marc Gottero, as part of a cloud process live on stage. Most of the time he was running around the conference meeting new and existing friends. Always looking around for a lap to get pet. After 18 years he retired, we miss you! Share your pictures of #BanditCloudExpert. |
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| Invite your colleagues to join the Developer Partner Community |
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