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Showing posts with the label mxgraph

Remote MCP Server to access an Oracle database in Claude on iOS

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Think of MCP ( Model Context Protocol ) as the universal adapter for AI assistants. Just like USB-C promised to connect any device to any port, MCP lets AI models connect to virtually any data source, application, or service through a standardized protocol. Whether it's a company database, a cloud service, or a local file system, MCP bridges the gap between AI and the tools you use. The buzz around MCP isn't just hype—it's solving a real problem. Until recently, getting AI to work with your specific data and workflows meant custom integrations, API wrangling, and a lot of developer headaches. MCP changes that by creating a common 'language' that AI models can use to communicate with external systems securely and efficiently. Although MCP is relatively new (created by Anthropic in November 2024), all major players are backing the protocol.  With developers rapidly building MCP servers for everything from databases to development tools, we're witnessing the birt...

APEX and Graph Visualisation Libraries

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I was recently asked by a client to create a quick POC in APEX to demonstrate how relationships between physical assets (in this case oil refineries) could be maintained using a graphical tool.  So I looked at a number of different Javascript graphing libraries  and chose MXGraph from JGraph  which seemed to have the most features and looked relatively easy to integrate.   It's worth mentioning that it is not Open Source and has a fairly hefty licence fee. The requirement was to be able to show the process flow between units in a particular oil refinery with relationships representing the refined output from one processing unit and the input into another.  The idea is to build out quite detailed maps of the process flows within refineries and then use this with other 3rd party outage data to predict the affect on production and thus ultimately the change in price of crude and refined oil products. The POC was quite simple, as you can see from the scree...