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In software development, the four basic functions are represented by the acronym CRUD: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. These facilitate viewing, searching, and changing information. Every application requires the presence of such functions.

If you are up to building a responsive web application in the most cost-effective way, using the Appery.io Pizza sample can be very handy. The sample is a fully functional responsive application—based on Google’s Material Design—to present pizza recipes along with ingredients. It includes create, read, update and delete functions as well as searching and filtering. In terms of components, the application consists of:

• Appery.io plug-in
• Database
• Server-side script

In order to make it live, you need very little in the way of development skills. It takes literally five minutes for a citizen developer to assemble the application out of building blocks as described in https://docs.appery.io/docs/material-angularjs-app-plugin-example. To further perfect the application, you can add more spicy features to fit your tastes as listed in https://docs.appery.io/docs/samples-overview.

Voilà, the Pizza application is ready!

Israel, a tiny country of only eight million people, has more startups per capita than any other country in the world. Most of the Israeli startups are focused on cybersecurity, digital marketing, medical equipment, and SaaS-based technologies. Unfortunately, Israeli startups have been struggling to scale for the last decade. Only a few companies have scaled up into enterprises. This is disappointing for a country with so much potential.

Each startup is unique, but every entrepreneur faces the same set of strategic challenges to overcome. According to successful entrepreneurs, once a startup is initiated, the founder needs to pay special attention to a few of the long-term strategic questions for scaling up.

• How do I strengthen my market position through innovation?
• How do I support growth in human capital?
• How do I attract foreign venture capital investors?

As part of focusing on these strategic points, the leading cloud-based, rapid development environment for building mobile and responsive apps, known as Appery.io, can become a Swiss army knife for entrepreneurs. Here’s why:

Concentrate on Innovation Not Infrastructure

With Appery.io, a citizen developer can build a basic mobile hybrid app connected to a cloud database literally in five minutes.

Furthermore, a team of professional developers can easily power up the original basic app with Appery.io built-in enterprise features. In a recent success story, we described such a collaboration in which the customer drafted the app screens using the platform and then our developers added in the rest.

Scale the Team Quickly

With R&D centers in North America and Europe, Appery.io can augment a startup team with five-hour, forty-hour, or longer assignments. And, a 24/7 support line is available to customers. All Appery.io in-house professionals are creative thinkers and leaders. In addition, they speak fluent English and Russian.

Gateway to the World Market

Appery.io provides several pathways into the world market for startups. Appery.io also has an extensive platform community of over 300,000 customers across the world. In addition, the Appery.io website publishes many success stories of innovative projects using its platform to a world-wide audience:

• HABITat, an AI-powered Personal Change App
• Dyjit’s Hospitality Platform
• Jobster, a money-making campus job app started by two recently graduated entrepreneurs, which is about to be delivered to the market.

Final Words

One more thing. Nothing is written in stone. Dare to desire. Appery.io is here to assist you.

While Bitcoin cryptocurrency is revolutionizing online payments, Ethereum is now ready to revolutionize any industry that deals with data or transactions of any kind:

• Banking and payments
• Cybersecurity
• Supply chain management
• Networking and IoT
• Forecasting
• Insurance
• Private transport & ride sharing
• Online data storage
• Charity
• Voting
• Government
• Public benefits
• Healthcare
• Energy management
• Online music
• Retail
• Real estate
• Crowdfunding

All the blockchain-based systems such as Bitcoin or Ethereum are software. In order to start using Ethereum, a wallet along with an associated address is required. Once this is in place, a dispatched transaction can be broadcast to the network, where “miners” verify it and add it to the transaction history.

Using Appery.io with Ethereum

Naturally, it’s quite easy to use Appery.io to build a hybrid app hooked up with Ethereum. It just takes a few simple steps to build the wallet and ready the Ethereum setup.

First things first. In order to do anything on an Ethereum network you need to create an account. There are various ways to go about this, but the simplest one, suggested by Ethereum developers, is through the command line tool. Once this is done, a public key and a private key are issued. The public key is your unique address on the network.

After that, if you want to go with your own cryptocurrency, you need to build a smart contract using the command line. This produces a unique smart contract address. Also, make sure that you manifest enough of your own coins on your smart contract.

Next, the easiest way to develop the wallet app is to leverage the Appery.io API Express Ethereum component. With Appery.io, a citizen developer can concentrate on innovation not infrastructure to build the wallet app. The wallet is a two-page app. The first page shows the current balance in various cryptocurrencies as well as a list of transactions. The second page executes transactions. In addition, a sign-in page can be introduced to address security issues. Under the hood, the Appery.io API Express Ethereum services (built into the component) consume the aforementioned account and contract addresses to do the job.

Then, you need to top up your account to start testing the wallet app. In order to obtain free test Ethers, please go to faucet.rinkeby.io.

Finally, start the wallet app. Voilà! Now you are ready to send and receive cryptocoins.

Screencap Gallery

This summer we will introduce a beta version of Ionic 3 App Builder in Appery.io! This will be a huge step forward for us and we would like to ask You, our customers, to help us test this mobile app development framework version in our platform.

Ionic 3 will be compatible with Angular 4 and comes with many significant performance, usability, and feature improvements over past versions.

This beta version will include the Ionic 3 components and only basic Appery.io platform features. (More details about specific features will be announced in a follow-up to this post.)

Thanks for staying with us all this time, and we hope You will like our new Ionic 3 version.

The May release for Appery.io mobile app platform is coming this weekend. The main new additions are:

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
• Ethereum Support

General Data Protection Regulation Compliance

The European Union has introduced new regulations for collecting and storing personal data. The regulations go into effect at the end of May. The regulations cover the information that can be requested by websites, from cookies to private email. This is an important thing to pay attention to for app builders—and app users.
So, we’ve rewritten our terms of use to comply with the new regulations.

(And, don’t worry. Your data is safe with us.)

Ethereum Support

Ethereum is a decentralized platform for running smart contracts, applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of down-time, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. These apps run on a custom-built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.

Now, this feature is available in the API Express part of our platform. The detailed description will be available in our documentation right after the release.

And Then, There’s More

The release includes a few other things. In features, the Fetch size parameter will be available for the SQL component (one of the most popular features of the API Express). And, there are fewer bugs. Of course, we have fixed a lot of them.

Keep in Touch

If you run into any hiccups with this release, please reach out to us via the forum or by sending us an email. (To send us an email, sign into the platform and click the Get Help link at the top.)

Finally, remember, our developers are always happy to help you with your application. To make you feel more comfortable about getting this help, you will see the complete sum (including all discounts) you’ll be charged before agreeing to proceed.

April 1st is Easter this year on the Western Christian calendar and April Fools’ Day in many countries, but it’s also the day we roll out another release of the Appery.io mobile app platfom. Here are some of the “Easter eggs” you’ll find in this release.

Ability to Use One’s Own SSL Certificates with Custom Domains for a Hosting Service

In Appery.io Builder you can create not only mobile apps but web apps too. You can easily publish them on our domain, but you might prefer to publish them on your own server. Before, this required advanced IT knowledge, but now it’s getting easier to upload your app to your custom domain because we’ve added the ability to upload SSL certificates directly in the Builder.

New Cordova Push Plug-in 2.x

Most of our users send push notifications in their apps. And since this release, we support the new version of the push plug-in with more advanced features!

Detailed documentation and examples will be available once we’ve rolled out this release.

Launch Storyboard Images for iOS

New features for iOS appear all the time. It’s great when they become available, but then Apple requires them to be in the apps uploaded to the AppStore. The launch image set, also known as splash screens, supported by the Appery.io platform has become outdated. So, in this release, we have introduced a new approach called launch storyboard images. You should get fewer issues with uploading your app to the AppStore, which is where they should be!

More Plan Information

Now you can get more information about your plan (Server Code Script Execution Interval, Burst Rate API, etc.) on your Account tab. Just click on the information button near your plan!

Creating a Database Connection Using a Custom JDBC URL

The is a new feature for our API Express! Now our users can create a database connection and specify only username, password, and JDBC URL. It’s a very useful option, for example, in some cases where you need to create a connection with an Oracle database. You will find out more in our documentation as soon as we roll out the release.

Only PNG Files for Splash Screens Available

New Cordova libraries require only .png images for the splash screen, so we have added this ability to avoid this issue.

Bugs (Less of Them)

No update is complete without bug fixes. So, yes, we fixed a great number of large and small bugs to make the platform better.

According to numerous scientific studies, a comfortable work environment directly contributes to the bottom line. Hear what these experts say:

“With high air quality, an individual productivity improvement can range from 13.5% up to 87%.”

— Prof. Vivian Loftness, Carnegie Mellon University

“The incidence of absenteeism or respiratory infections was found to be lower among people working in high air quality environments.”

— Prof. Anthony V. Arundel, University of Tasmania

With that in mind, we decided to improve its controllable indoor air quality. To accomplish this goal, an Appery.io-powered solution has been built to control temperature and humidity in its office spaces in the face of the most demanding conditions.

The solution’s design is based on a hub to aggregate probes, a database, and a mobile app. Appery.io API Express (built into the Appery.io platform) was used to expose both the Raspberry Pi sensors and the Appery.io cloud database as REST services, making the orchestration process smooth and fast.

In addition, each conference facility is managed by a booking app to ensure higher utilization. As a result of its initial success, that booking app was extended to provide an interface for controlling indoor air quality.

The really amazing thing was that the complete solution was designed, developed, and tested in about 16 hours.

Today we are introducing a new way for enterprise customers to get the benefits of using our API Express backend services.

API Express allows enterprises to quickly “mobilize” existing systems by making it easier to add RESTful APIs so that theses systems can easily be accessed from other applications including mobile or desktop apps. This enables the modernization of legacy systems without re-writing them. This is highly beneficial as many enterprises are still constrained by legacy applications that are not mobile friendly.

With API Express Standalone, enterprises are now free to deploy this service behind their own firewall, while still taking advantage of the rest of the Appery.io platform in the cloud. Enterprise customers will now be able to install API Express on demand using a Docker container. For more details about the configuration process and about installing see our documentation.

Twilio is a wonderful communication as a service platform that allows sending SMS messages from your app via a REST API. In this blog post you will learn how to send an SMS message from the Appery.io Server Code in about 5 minutes.

1. Sign into your Appery.io account (you will also need to have a Twilio account).
2. Go to the Server Code page.
3. Server Code has a built-in Twilio SMS plug-in. You just need to add it to your account. Go to the Plugins tab. You will see a list of Server Code plugins:
   

   Server Code plug-ins

4. Locate the Twilio plugin (Quickly send SMS message with Twilio) and click import. A script called Twilio_SendSMS that sends the SMS will be inserted in the Script panels. A library called Twilio_Base64_library that helps with authentication will also be inserted in the Library panel.
5. Open the Twilio_SendSMS script:

   var accountSid = ""; //Your Twilio account sid
   var authToken = ""; //Your Twilio account token 
   var twilioUrl = "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/";
   
   var from = ""; //Your Twilio number
   
   var to = request.get("to"); //To phone number
   var body = request.get("body"); //Text of the message
   
   var XHRResponse = XHR2.send("POST", twilioUrl + accountSid + "/Messages.json", {
     "body": "To=" + encodeURIComponent(to) + "&From=" + encodeURIComponent(from) + "&Body=" + body,
     "headers": {
        Authorization: "Basic " + encodeBase64(accountSid + ":" + authToken),
        "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
     }
   });
   
   Apperyio.response.success(XHRResponse.body, "application/json");

   You need to set the accountSid, the authToken and your Twilio phone number. You can find this information in the Twilio console.

   

   Twilio SMS

6. Once you set those values you are ready to test the script. Switch to Script parameters tab.
7. Add two parameters:
   1. to (that’s the number where the message will be sent)
   2. body (that’s the message)
      These are request parameters into the script (and the API) and are read on lines 9-10.
8. Switch to Test tab and click the Save and run button.

Testing Twilio SMS API

And this is how it looks on the phone:

SMS message

Once you tested the Server Code script, it can be quickly added to your app. Here is a video that shows how to import services into an app. Every Server Code script is also an automatically a REST API. To see the endpoint for this script switch to API information tab. To learn more about Server Code, check our the Server Code YouTube playlist where you will find many short videos.

Heads up! As the new year starts, we will have to take down the development platform (App Builder) for two maintenance windows (times US Pacific).

This is all due to Amazon AWS updates that have to be performed. We will try to minimize the Appery.io development platform’s downtime as much as we can, but the downtime could last through the whole window for each window. Remember, though, all our Backend Services will continue to work without interruption during this maintenance.