The Goal

Gone are the days where we build applications and just think about graphical user interfaces, look and feel etc., There is a new interface that is gaining popularity. As Amazon, Google and Apple are bringing in voice assistants, it has become extremely important for us to learn how to build voice-activated applications. Voice based commands are much more complex than a GUI, user actions on our application are limited to button clicks, combo box selections, typing in text fields comprise of the majority of instructions. With touchscreen, we can see some more actions users can perform like swipe, pinch, zoom, rotate etc., However, with voice a single user may ask our application to do specific tasks in wide variety of ways, to increase the complexity even further different people may use and each have their own way of speaking. Alexa provides a simple framework to build these skills. In this article I will show you how you can build your own Alexa Skills.

Here is a moderate problem of CodeJam’s qualification round of 2016. The Jam Coins. It is an interesting problem which gives a glimpse into another popular virtual currency, bit-coin mining. Here is the description of the problem. You need to generate jamcoins of either 16 digits for small dataset or 32 digits for large datasets. Jam Coins follow the given rules…

1. A Jam Coin is only made up of 1’s & 0’s of the required number of digits.
2. It begins and ends with 1.
3. If that interpreted from base 2 to base 10, it should not be a prime number in any of them.

For Small dataset, you need to generate 50 jam coins of 16 digits and for large dataset, you need to generate 500 jam coins of 32 digits following above rules.

We use Dyn/Admin for many of the development related tasks of Oracle Commerce(ATG). However, the log-in ticket expires too frequently forcing us to enter credentials repeatedly. Some times we will also have to give both application server(weblogic/jboss) credentials and dynamo administration credentials. As we are not in a production critical environment where multiple people may access our DynAdmin and create issues, it is not necessary to have this security check every time we try to open DynAdmin of our development environment. I have found following solutions to be free of this issue. This can come in handy when we are doing active development and have to frequently access dynamo administration.

Solution 1 - Enable lazyAthentication

This approach works by enabling Lazy Athentication which means login will only be asked once per session. This means, as long as the session is not expired, dyn/admin will not ask for credentials again.

Perforce is a proprietary version controlling system. It has been around for more than 20 years. However, one glaring limitation always bugs the users. The inability to generate proper diff files. Where is my patch? I can anticipate what is going on in your mind, we can generate a diff file by using the command line interface. p4 diff helps us generate a diff file. However if you ever had a misfortune of trying to generate patch files on regular basis.

Oracle Commerce or ATG is an Ocean. There are so many concepts in Oracle Commerce (previously known as ATG), that makes coming up with Hello World program little difficult.

• Do you mean to create one JSP page and deploy it like commerce reference store?
• Do you want to create a component just to see in Dyn/Admin?
• Do you want to create a new repository? Depending on what you want to do, the approach to take will be different.

To work with Oracle Commerce, you don’t have to know about persisting data in database. If you approach Oracle Commerce programming with J2EE & MVC experience, you may find it little difficult to cope with it unless you start with a fresh mind, because things are very different in this platform. Today, I will demonstrate how to create a simple component so that it can be viewed in Dyn/Admin. Let us assume that you are trying to create it in your own module instead of existing module like DAS or DAF. Follow the the steps shown below.

Step 1: Create an Eclipse project

Create an Eclipse project and make sure you add all the necessary class files to the build path. Add classes.jar or DAS at the least.