If you live in North Carolina and dabble in technology, you might have attended Cisco Live Local Edition which just recently took place in both Charlotte and Raleigh. There were many participating vendors showing off their latest networking, collaboration and other various technologies. Kamlesh Shah who is a Cisco Consulting Systems Engineer and myself Brett Tiller, a Developer Evangelist for Cisco DevNet, were there presenting a few of the components of Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA).
We presented two courses: Coding-101 and Coding-201. Each course spanned 2 ½ hours and included hands-on labs to give users the chance to learn some basics about the technologies discussed within each. The technologies discussed in Coding-101 are also covered in the Cisco DevNet Learning Labs under labs: Coding 101 and Coding 102. For the course Coding-201 the corresponding labs are: APIC-EM APIs with Python, CMX 10 Mobility Services REST, and Git 100: Basics of the git version control system.
Coding-101 covered the web service Representational State Transfer (REST), the Cisco product Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (APIC-EM) and JavaScript Open Notation (JSON). APIC-EM is a controller based component of DNA and provides REST APIs allowing engineers to automate management of the network. JSON formatted data is passed and received. Focusing more on REST and APIC-EM, communication to the server was demonstrated via Postman which is a web based client. This client allowed users to understand web based communication along with APIC-EM without having to learn how to write code. The course was completed with users running Python scripts to see how the same tasks could be achieved programmatically.
Coding-201 built on top of the Coding-101 course and focused upon teaching users how to write basic Python code in order to learn how to parse JSON data. Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) which is a cloud based component of DNA and provides REST based APIs to track the location of network devices was introduced. Python syntax, datatypes, looping and functions were introduced and JSON formatting along with steps required to access the data was discussed. In the labs users wrote python code to parse various forms of JSON data.
Overall the classes were well attended and participants were excited to learn how to write code and get their hands on Cisco Technology.
