Blog

Happy Holidays! Before we close out 2014, we wanted to update the Appery.io platform with a number of really cool features:

• Team collaboration enhancements
• URL-based security in Secure Proxy
• Faster proxy
• Sharing with Appery.io support
• New XHR implementation

Team collaboration enhancements

Team collaboration is one of the core features in the Appery.io platform. After getting feedback from users, we have revamped collaboration with more enterprise-level features and today we introduce the new Team and Permissions features. First, we introduce the notion of a role. A role can be assigned to any team member and has default permissions (which of course can be changed). Let’s look at this in more detail.

Roles

Now you can assign one of four available roles to your teammates:

• Admin
• Team Lead
• Developer
• Tester

Each role has default permissions.  For example, only the Admin and Team Lead can manage teams by inviting, removing and changing roles for certain users. But only the Admin can manage account subscription and order support packs. You can find a brief description of each role here.

Access to each main resource in the Appery.io platform – app, database, webhooks, certificates, server code script, and so on can now be set on the Permissions tab (available on each resource) and managed by Admin or Team Lead roles.

Permissions for a resource

To learn more, please read Team and Permissions page.

Permissions

By default different roles have different permissions. You can add or remove certain permissions for any resource as well as enable or disable entire resource access. To manage these permissions go to the Account > Team tab. You can also manage your team from this page:

Setting permissions user-by-user

Developing apps on Appery.io platform with your team has become much more flexible with new roles and permissions.

URL-based security in Secure Proxy

Appery.io Secure Proxy (previously known as Secure REST) provides two important features:

1. If a REST API service doesn’t support cross-domain calls or CORS, you can use the proxy to invoke the API from any domain
2. You can keep sensitive and private data on the server such as API keys, usernames, passwords, URLs or anything else you don’t want to keep on the client. Keeping sensitive data off the client is a good security practice.

To further improve security, we have added a URL-based filter to the Secure Proxy:

URL-based filter to the Secure Proxy

Now you can allow access only to needed resources and be sure that your REST calls will not be redirected somewhere else for hacking purposes.

Faster proxy

Who doesn’t like it when things work faster? We have also updated the proxy implementation and it now works a lot faster: maximum response time has be reduced in three times. Average response time has been reduced on 25%.

Sharing with Appery.io support

Within this update we improved how you interact with our support team. Now any resource can be shared with support. This is very helpful when you have a problem and need the Appery.io support team to access the particular resource for testing:

Dialog box for sharing a project’s files with support

New XHR implementation

This will be helpful for those who uses XHR (to send an Ajax request) in their Server Code scripts. The new XHR library supports additional HTTP methods such as HEAD, OPTIONS and TRACE and it also works faster than the old XHR implementation. We didn’t remove the old XHR library and all of your scripts will still use it until you change it yourself.
All you need to do to start using the new XHR library is to change the namespace to XHR2 as shown here:

var XHRResponse = XHR2.send("GET", "...", {});

We recommend that you switch all your XML HTTP Requests to the new XHR library.

In addition to these new features, we made other minor improvements and bug fixes.  We hope you will enjoy the new features.  As always, please reach out to us with your feedback.

The best keeps getting better

So, enjoy the new improvements in Appery.io:

• Team collaboration enhancements
• URL-based security in Secure Proxy
• Faster proxy
• Sharing with Appery.io support
• New XHR implementation

The Appery.io team wishes you Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and happy app building in 2015!