This blog series demonstrates how easy it is to quickly build a small app based on a new or existing service and to run it as a service in the cloud.

We will build the proof-of-concept for a web app that enables people to better understand how written communication is perceived by their end-users and how to improve the tone of communication.

We’ve explored the options and we’ve selected the IBM Tone Analyzer service. Why this service? It leverages cognitive linguistic analysis to identify the tone of input content enabling users to refine and improve communications.

The diagram below describes the flow of calls to the service.

Photo credits: #IBM

Let’s create the proof-of-concept following these steps:

Step 1: Build a Basic Cloud Foundry Application

Traditional style environments can be used to build cloud applications and transform them into a proof of concept in virtually no time.

Learn how to develop a basic web application that runs in the IBM Cloud, using rapid application development and Plack, a Perl-based web service.

Step 2: Extend the basic web app to use IBM Tone Analyzer

Learn how to use the Tone Analyzer cloud service to transform the basic application into an application that analyzes given text and returns tone scoring per sentence.

Step 3: Improve the output look and feel

Focusing on the technical implementation, the extended application returns a rather rude output, JSON results that report the tone of your input. So next, learn how to improve the output’s look and feel.

Step 4: Enhance the web app to evaluate the content of a web page

Going beyond people who are fond of analyzing copy/pasted text, we’d like to also focus our attention on people who would like to evaluate the content of a web page.

Learn how to enhance the application to evaluate the content of a web page from a given. We will try reusing as much as possible from the application we’ve already built.

Step 5: Add security and logging

We’ve learned from experience that doing it right from the beginning will help us avoid issues when going live. Minding the web app security and logging early in the proof–of–concept phase will well worth the time and effort. Why? To avoid later security issues when building a production-ready application.

Luckily that the framework we’ve used for developing the web app provides some general security options that can easily be implemented.

Logging is an essential tool when developing to get in-depth insights as well as in production to trace incidents and do postmortem analysis. Adding logging from the beginning will help us identify any oddities and make proper corrections on the spot along the way.

Learn how to add security and logging to the cloud web app.

The Takeaway

IBM’s Cloud Foundry offering provides a no-brainer solid infrastructure that allows you to go from concept to implementation in a matter of hours.

In this blog series, we’ve shown you how to build a secure proof-of-concept web app in 5 simple steps.

But it doesn’t end there. Taking a few extra steps and linking your app up with additional services can alleviate the concept to a money-making service.

 

I hope this post was helpful. Do you have any tips you would add? Let me know in the comments and please share this post with a friend if you enjoyed it.