- It says, "During the BETA period, all Watson Services will be available for free on Bluemix." So what are the prices after the beta period? I can't put the time into learning this if it's not viable after the beta.
- What is Bluemix? Is it just the "place where all the services are?"
2. BlueMix is the IBM PaaS - it has a lot of powerful services beyond Watson - http://bluemix.net. It allows you to create and deploy apps in the cloud.
Like - I'm not really going to be using this in my next Android / IPhone app any time soon.
I wouldn't build my company around the beta of Watson, but if you experiment during beta, you could have first mover advantage when the pricing comes out and you find it acceptable.
* Plug for python - lots of ml / nlp / scientific computing done with using python.
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
To make a simple call with the Java example, you've managed to write 372 lines of code.
Three hundred and seventy two lines.
That's some bad code.
There's nothing I can point at and go, that, that's what's wrong, the whole thing just has a lot of code smells. The 'zZz's (what is that DIY escaping all about?). The multiple http calls that should have been abstracted into one function, but aren't. The over commenting. The api structure requiring you to do 3+ calls. The exponential call back time (this is not a good idea, have fun with weird bugs). That you've made your own json objects. That you've used PUT for a pretty tenuous reason. That you've put all the urls in some config file or something, so the code isn't particularly clear at what it's doing.
The ruby & javascript are more terse because those languages are, but they aren't that much better. It's often silly little things, like this:
'/status?' + querystring.stringify({'jobid':jobid});
'/status?jobid=' + jobid;
The code reads like a sysadmin/amateur/uni professor's code, a scripter rather than a professional programmer's. It's like you don't have a senior dev on the team to cast an eye over it and get rid of the excesses.
The APIs themselves are not bad, as I mentioned there's the slightly tenuous PUT stuff, the only other annoyance I could see is that you'd have to ping it all the time to see if it's ready. I appreciate why, and you've made the right call in the callback vs ping, simply because so often when hacking setting up a callback would be hell.
It's better than a lot, like google or paypal, so it's not all bad.
NB: But now I just found this exploring github:
https://github.com/Watson-Explorer/wex-wdc-integration-sampl...
Which at first glance is better code than the examples on the site? Bit odd.
Assumptions, more often than not, (1) change, (2) are understood differently by others, and/or (3) (as in this case) are flat-out wrong. Code that takes "advantage" of such silly assumptions usually (1) are poor examples to coders new to the project, (2) complicate reviewing the code for correctness, and (3) waste brain-time figuring out when they can (and can't) be applied.
Just escape everything that should be, whether you think you know what it is/where it came from or not.