Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions interacting with digital systems and software. Just like people, software robots can do things like understanding what’s on a screen, complete the right keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and perform a wide range of defined actions.

RPA processes are widely used for the configuration of task automation. This technology is essential for the automation of repetitive back-office processes. There are numerous RPA tools available in the market and choosing one could be a challenge. In this blog, we will learn how to create a chatbot web application using different RPA tools.

Why We Need RPA Tools

RPA tools aren’t replacements for the underlying business applications, they simply automate the manual tasks of human workers. They essentially look at the screens that regular workers look at to fill in and update the same boxes and fields within the user interface (UI) by pulling the right data from the relevant location. This serves a couple of purposes:

• It frees humans from monotonous, low-value-add tasks like data entry and makes them available for higher-value tasks that require human creativity, ingenuity, and decision making
• It helps to ensure that outputs are complete, correct, and consistent between tasks and between human workers
• It helps to ensure that tasks can be completed more quickly because the robotic process automation tool can find and retrieve any necessary data in the background

Different RPA Tools

OutSystems

OutSystems is the most complete full-stack application development platform. It quickly creates mobile and web applications, chatbots, and reactive web apps for any device. You can build your data models, workflows, logic, pixel-perfect UI, and interactions, and allows you to add your custom code.

This tool makes it very easy to create a mobile or web application.

The implementation requires an Integration Development Environment (IDE), which is used to develop the application known as a service portal. You can get the service portal by creating a free account from OutSystem portal. The IDE will look like this:

First, click on “install application.” It will prompt you to another window that will ask you to choose if you have a reactive web application, tablet application, or mobile application. Then, there will be an additional window that informs and allows you to choose if you’re creating a responsive web application, tablet application, or mobile application.

Then we select the “reactive web application.” It will prompt you to provide a unique name to your application. Then click the “create button” option.

Next, you have to name your RPA module. Creating your module helps develop your web app. Click “create module,” and it’ll redirect you to your main explorer.

In the main menu, you’ll find files of required modules. You can then add in any page or custom module from this menu in the screenshot below:

As we create the chatbot web application, we also will need to include a home screen. We’ll create the home screen for our app, then specify the script module by right-clicking on the “main view” module.

Select “empty” in the dialog box, then click on it. You will find the basic workflow of your application below. It’s important to note that to run our chatbot application, we will need an event to occur. We would select the “OnReady” event in the home screen module.

Once we add our custom JavaScript language, we’ll click on the green icon located in the middle corner of the ide to save and publish. Once the app is published, it will direct you to the browser to have the first look at our simple chatbot application.

Pega

Pega is a tool for managing business processes. It’s suitable for use on desktop servers and solely offers cloud-based services or solutions. It’s compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac. This program is ideal for medium and big companies.

It has an event-driven approach, which works based on a user-defined event so that it works faster. It’s a robust and reliable tool, which has been used by many organizations having the need for an RPA.

We’ll also try to create a simple chatbot using Pega:

To create the chatbot using the Pega RPA tool, we need to install the Pega Dev studio to create the chatbot application. The dev studio will look like this:

We will try to create a “case creation” chatbot, which creates the case, or service ticket, when chatting with an end-user, meaning, you would need to specify the case details in the request and response architecture.

Click on the “web chatbot” button. It will prompt you to the next dialogue box, which allows us to specify the name of our chatbot channel as well as the request and response command.

In the above screenshot, we have specified the name of the chatbot channel and request command, which will then request the entity to provide basic information, which we need to create the case.

In the “response view,” you’ll find two commands that were already created like “hi” and “cancel,” which are considered as default commands for our chatbot. For our chatbot to work properly, work we need to create the workflow of our chatbot and specify the workflow which can be configured inside the chatbot tab in the dev studio.

We can provide the basic rule sets with automation with the help of flowcharts.

Now our chatbot is ready to test. We can find the runtime scenario of our chatbot in the preview tab in the right corner of the dev studio inside our channel explorer.

IBM Watson

IBM Watson RPA provides all core capabilities. IBM Watson can easily be used as your web application automation tool. It can work on any platform with any application. You need to have programming skills to use this tool, but it is user-friendly for developers. This tool is perfect for medium and large organizations.

Some of its features include:

• Supports a multi-environment deployment model
• Security provided for network and software credentials
• It can be used on any platform
• Can work for any application
• It’s provided by IBM Cloud

We’ll also try to create a simple chatbot using IBM Watson.

First, log in to IBM Cloud. Search for Watson Assistance. Then, add your workspace and provide the name for our workspace, such as how the chatbot looks like below.

Now, we need to train Watson for our chatbox customization. Once we created the workspace, we’ll be redirected to a window that will say, “add intents.” We’ll now see the chatbot in the left corner of the window, which will help us configure our request and the corresponding response. In the screenshot below, we’ll configure hello as the request and hello as the corresponding response. Our IBM Watson chatbot will implement in a few short minutes. This specific technique saves time and is very resourceful to use.

RPA Tools Are Easy to Use

RPA tools are popular in today’s market and are incredibly helpful when building additional application integrations into our typical web apps. For more information on how you can utilize these tools, contact our experts today.

References Link:

https://www.visualcron.com/robotic-process-automation.aspx

The database is a significant piece of any application, ready to store and retrieve information for manipulation. The database server itself might be the back-end of a database application (the occurrence), or it might be the equipment PC that has the example. Now and again, it might even allude to the mix of both equipment and programming. Regardless of what it is, the database server is a very important part of keeping applications functional, which is why businesses are turning to database clustering.

What is database clustering?

The grouping of two or more database servers is known as database clustering. This is done by joining database servers over a network via a dedicated device like a load balancer to the HTTP (application server). This environment is created to overcome the issues that may arise from single databases, which are elaborated upon below.

Why cluster your databases?

Providing continuous application service is a big deal for organizations to achieve their business goals. However, nowadays, many organizations face issues in providing high performance and continuous application service to their clients. These issues usually fall in the following categories:

Increased load on the database server (load balance issue):

If servers have been interacting with many users through the website, the number of queries coming from the users might overload a single database server. The result of this is the site becoming unresponsive.

Server failover (availability issue):

Sometimes, a database server might go down due to an internal system software (OS) exception. This results in the application going down.

Slow response (performance issue):

Many times, the number of sleep queries (database connections that are waiting to be closed) and complex read and write queries in a job queue cause the target database and application to run slowly.

When do we think about database clustering?

If you’re an entrepreneur, director, or database administrator, you care about database clustering because it helps keep your applications online a greater amount of the time. When done appropriately, clustering makes your database profoundly accessible and conquers the above issues.

How does database cluster architecture work?

In database cluster engineering, all requests go to numerous servers, meaning an individual client request is executed and created by various servers. The clustering adjusts the capacity of burden and enables high accessibility. On the off chance that one server goes down, the request is executed by another server. As a result, the risk of total framework disappointments is reduced.

Client queries to the database often come in the form of a web request (or HTTP request) to get or store data. These requests are carried out over the internet and through the server, which accepts the web request. It then transfers the request over to the load balancers, which are connected to the set of servers that are dedicated to working for the processing database requests. The request is either passed to the highly available server or to multiple servers concurrently in cases where servers are working together to respond back very quickly.

How to create database clusters

A database cluster is exceptionally far-reaching. It covers different levels and courses of action contingent upon the necessity of the framework. Here, we will discuss three kinds of group figuring models: failover clustering, high-performance clustering, and burden (load) adjusting groups. The services organizations offer to their clients differ, and the type of database clustering depends on the service.

Failover clustering

Organizations often implement at least two database server clustering environments. They do this because a server may fail due to a critical reason, which is very tough to face in a single cluster environment. If one server goes down, the second paired cluster can provide database service to the application server continuously. The organization ensures data is synchronized across both server1 and server2 with the help of monitoring mechanisms, which specifically monitor the servers and their data synchronization.

The concept of replication is taken here to overcome the issue of server failover. If one server were to go down, another one should act as the one which is down, and all data of down server should be processed by another web server which is in an up state.

High performance clustering

Let us consider an example of an e-commerce application. If any offer or any sale is occurring on a site, then a lot of users (customers of the application) are connected. Connections are processed to the HTTP web server and then to the database server. As a result, lots of queries from the webserver have been executed on the single database server.

Some queries that are read write operations (complex queries like UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE) keep executing, which impacts the performance (high CPU and memory utilization). This may result in a very slow response from the site to the user. In such cases, the organization may implement a database cluster if the clients develop or host the business site. By using this technique, the organization may not have to face the issue of the high response time issue.

This clustering plays an important role in serving e-commerce applications, where the requests are scattered over the group of database clusters and sent back to the client efficiently via a HTTP server. One important feature in this cluster is a database management system, which works to retrieve back requests from many nodes within a distribution through a single request from the user. This overcomes complex query issues and optimizes distributed query responses.

Burden adjusting

In a load-balanced environment, load balancers connect the web to database clusters. In these instances, the load, which comes from an external database query request from the HTTP server, gets sent over a single database server, unless it touches the specific threshold values. If it reaches the threshold, the HA proxy, which is one of the great software-based TCP/HTTP load balancers, maximizes the performance of the application by distributing the queries and workload across the set of clusters.

The main advantage in load balancing is that the application accesses the database server via an IP address which belongs to the load balancer. The load balancer must then check the server’s CPU utilization for one that is in lower or an ideal state, before the request is passed to that server. The server then replies by progressing the output to the web server and the web server to the client.

Advantages of database clustering

In conclusion, database clustering offers the following advantages:

• Data redundancy
  • Multiple computers can work together to store data amongst each other with database clustering. This gives the advantage of data redundancy.
• Load distribution:
  • By load balancing, you allocate the workload among the different computers that are part of the cluster.
  • High accessibility:
• Clustering overcomes the risk of application failure due to the risk that the server may go down.

Despite all of these technology distributions at the back-end, it appears to be a single system to the user. The scope of clusters varies from enterprise to enterprise, depending on the kind of processes and level of performance required.