Now that our node.js web server is hosted by Heroku and up and running live on the web, let's start talking with it.
As I already hinted, I would like to move into graphical topics as quickly as possible, e.g., by sending a string of polygon coordinate values and asking it to render them as a 2D polygon.
Before getting to that, though, a very exciting non-graphical usage is offered by the new Autodesk ProgGen Web Service.
ProgGen is a cloud-based web service for automatically generating program code to solve simple tasks described in spoken English language. The functionality is still evolving and the service is currently in beta.
It is based on crowd-driven machine learning algorithms similar to those fuelling the huge success of Google Translate, which has amply proved far superior to the decades of academic research fruitlessly poured into previous automated translation efforts.
These powerful algorithms have been unleashed on the huge volume of open source implementations freely available on GitHub, and Autodesk now launched this experimental web service to automatically generate source code for arbitrary simple tasks in various programming languages directly from a spoken language input description.
Currently, the languages supported are all .NET oriented and include:
- C#
- Visual Basic
- Delphi
- Managed C++
- Oxygene
- F#
You can try it out live yourself right here!
Type a short description of the task you would like to achieve, select the desired target programming language and submit:
Your input is processed by my new node.js server hosted on Heroku that analyses the input task description, queries the Autodesk ProgGen Web Service for a suitable implementation, and returns the result in a separate browser window right here and now.
Impressed?
Well, I should hope so. So am I!
For the sake of completeness, here is the source code of the Heroku server index.js file implementing this functionality. Just like in the previous example showing how to host a node server on Heroku, the entire rest of the code is completely unchanged from the Heroku Node.js getting started script.
Read all about the Autodesk ProgGen Web Service and get started today with this exciting new technology!
Addendum: Don't miss the related article by Kean Walmsley on software reverse engineering and the new Autodesk SoCap product.
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