nfriedly
commented
7 years ago Hi @ToonTalk,
While I don't foresee this capability being offered directly in the near future, I put together a quick little server that you can run to provide this capability to your students: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/token-generator
You could run it on a Bluemix instance or, if permitted by the school, run it on a computer in your classroom (your PC, a Raspberry Pi, etc.) or that you provide elsewhere.
Other Notes:
- The only services that use API keys directly are Alchemy API services and Visual Recognition (which is partially based on Alchemy Vision.)
- While all other services support Auth Tokens, they do not all support CORS at the moment. In particular, Language Translator and Retrieve and Rank have limited or no CORS support.
ToonTalk
In order to receive the authorisation token users currently need to run CURL or the like. The enhancement I suggest is to make https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/authorization/api/v1/token?url=https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/tone-analyzer/api support CORS so a web page can get a token to use in subsequent tone analyser API calls until it expires.
What I want is for students to be given a URL to which they add ?user=: and the web page passes the information to http://gateway.watsonplatform.net/authorization. This doesn't work due to CORS errors. Once the token is available there no longer are CORS errors but to obtain an authorization token for the tone analyser the students would need to do complex and error prone steps outside of the browser.
Note that schools (and corporations) often make it difficult to install any software (e.g. CURL) so a pure browser-based solution is strongly preferred.
Note that there was no similar problem with the Vision Recognition API since the browser can pass the API key without a CORS error.
I don't know which other Watson services like the Tone Analyzer rely upon authorization tokens instead of API keys and hence would also benefit from this change.