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Cloud Services

In the past year or so, we have witnessed a major shift from client-server to client-cloud. This shift is primarily fueled by two factors: mobile devices exceeding desktop computers and the thousands of different APIs available on the Internet today. What started in early 2000 on eBay and Amazon has become a real revolution in 2012 with thousands of companies, from Twitter and Facebook to AT&T, offering cloud-based services.

REST API
One of the most common ways to access private or public service APIs is via REST requests.

In the client-server approach an organization builds applications that consume its own internal content and resources. However, even large IT organizations such as AT&T, Verizon and Amazon have come to realize that they are no match for the social consumer and social enterprise developers out there. By making APIs publicly available, these organizations hope that developers and “citizen developers” will come and build applications and mobile apps on top of their services.

Citizen developers at work
Analysts at Gartner see a trend toward app creation independent of IT. They predict that by 2014, citizen developers – employees outside of IT and software development – will build 25% of new business applications. In 2007, they built less than 5%.

One of the best-known API success stories comes from Amazon: Its cloud service APIs let outsiders access the company’s massive data centers. Twitter, with its deceptively simple 140-character message model, exploded thanks to its API. In fact, you probably read and write tweets via a Twitter application or mobile app rather than going directly to Twitter’s Web site. Facebook’s Graph API has spawned a whole industry of apps to support its hundreds of millions of users.

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Last week we published the first public Plug-in that allows to send SMS messages via AT&T SMS API. The plug-in also comes with a sample app that you can try. The only thing you need to do is provide your AT&T app information.

There are two ways to import the plugin. You can add the plugin when a new app is created or import into already existing app.

Adding to a new app

1. From Apps page, click Start Now
2. Click App Builder > Go
3. Click Mobile App > Start Now
4. Select Blank Mobile App template, click Next
5. Enter app name and click Add Plugins
   
6. Select Communication/AT&T SMS
7. Click Create Project With Select Plugins
8. As AT&T API requires authentication, you can optionally enter all the information here:
   
   This information can be found in AT&T app settings. If you don’t enter the information during this step, you can enter it by going to Project > ServiceSettings after the app has been created
9. That’s it, the app is created with the AT&T SMS plugin:
   

Adding to an existing app

1. If you have an existing app, from Projects view click the block icon (to the right of Create New… button)
   
2. Then select the plugin:
   
3. Click Import Select Plugins and you are done

That’s it. We will be adding more plug-ins very soon.

Kinvey is one of those services that makes building mobile backend way too simple. If you combine Kinvey with a cloud-based app builder Appery.io, you get everything you need to build an awesome mobile app using cloud services. Let me show you what I mean.

To start, sign up for Kinvey, it’s free and then create your first app backend. We re going to create a backend for beers(!).

Next, create a new collection where we are going to store names of beer we like:

Open the collection. When you open it for the first time it will be empty so we need to define at least one column and enter some data. Click on +Col, and add Name column. Then add a few sample entries by clicking +Row. You can simply double click in Name column to enter values (you don’t need to enter anything for _id or _acl).

That’s pretty much all you need to do. Simple, right?

Let’s now go to Appery.io app builder and create a jQuery Mobile app.

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We just published a very nice hands-one tutorial on how to build HTML5/jQuery Mobile app connected to StackMob API. StackMob is super easy to use service for creating a mobile back-end for your app. Everything you create is instantly exposed as REST.

Give it a try!

We just published a new tutorial that shows you how to build an HTML5 mobile app connected to OpenShift REST API. It’s based on this example.

The app has two pages, and two services. One service gets the current list of users. The second services creates a new user. Give it a try and let us know if you have any questions!

ReadWriteMobile has posted an interesting Infographic created by Kinvey mapping the current mobile ecosystem (click on image to view larger version):

(Image source: http://kinvey.com/images/kinvey_backend-as-a-service_mobileecosystem_2100px.png)

First of all thanks to Kinvey for creating this wonderful map and including Appery.io in it (blue Mobile SDK line). Appery.io could actually span 3 different lines: BaaS, Mobile SDK and Mobile API. Appery.io is a cloud-based HTML5 mobile app builder, so it’s not exactly a mobile SDK. In fact, the technology under the hood is HTML, JavaScript and jQuery Mobile. For hybrid apps, the app can be wrapped in PhoneGap, which also provides access to native device features. So, there is no really “custom” SDK.

Second, from the builder it’s incredibly easy to consume any REST API (yellow Mobile API line). Appery.io comes with a pretty nice REST services console where any service can be tested. From the same console, the REST service response (structure) can be automatically created. Once the service is defined, it is mapped to jQuery Mobile UI using a visual mapper (UI to service input, service output to UI).

Thirdly, as most BaaS services (orange line) are exposed as REST, HTML5 mobile app built in Appery.io, can easily connect and use those services.

Lastly, and maybe the most important point is how incredibly fast you can build apps. It sort of all makes sense.. you got cloud-based mobile backend (exposed as REST) and cloud-based app builder to build the apps. It sounds simple.. but a really elegant picture.

This perfectly describes Appery.io. Appery.io is cloud-based builder for creating HTML5, jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, and RESTful mobile apps.

Originally posted here.

Mapping mobile UI to service is one of the most basic tasks in any mobile app (or a standard Web application). Input data entered by the user is sent to the service (input), the service is invoked, returns data (result) is sent back to the app for displaying results. Appery.io Mobile Apps Builder makes it super easy to map UI to service. Let’s look at an example.

REST service settings:

REST service input parameters:

REST service output parameters:

To open the standard mapping editor, there are two buttons in properties for a service:

Mapping UI to service look like this:

The service input parameters are on the left and are mapped to input components and properties on the right.

Mapping service back to UI for displaying the result looks like this:

The service output parameters are on the left and are mapped to output components and properties on the right.

Now there is even a more visual way to do the same. There is a new Data Mapping tab in the main editor, clicking the tab will open a visual data mapping editor:

That’s a pretty cool way to do mobile UI to REST service mapping.

When: November 16, Wednesday, 11am US Pacific Time
Register: https://​www1​.go​tomeeting​.com/​r​e​g​i​s​t​e​r​/​4​6​6​4​2​5​672

One of the great things about Appery.io Mobile Apps Builder is its support for end-to-end development, going all the way from an idea in one person’s mind to an app running in thousands of phones. In this webinar, we’ll show you exactly how it’s done (and how easy it is) by walking you through a hands-on example. The focus will be on exporting options for apps. In this case, we’ll export an Android binary (.apk) and publish to the Android Market. Of course, we’ll quickly build an app first, so you can learn or refresh your memory about how to build the UI with jQuery Mobile, connect to REST services, and test the app.

In the context of mobile apps, basic access authentication is way for a Web browser to provide user name and password when invoking a REST service. A REST service that requires basic access authentication will look like this:

https://username:password@www.host.com/products

As you can see we are using https: and passing the username and password to the service.

Working with REST services (that return JSON or XML) is very easy in Appery.io Mobile Apps Builder. Appery.io comes with a service editor where you define service settings such as URL, and data format type (JSON, JSON, or XML). Request Parameters – for defining service inputs. Response Parameters – for defining service outputs.

Service properties for Twitter Search REST API:

Another very important feature of the service editor is the ability to test the service right from Appery.io. Here is an example testing Twitter search service:

From this screen you can also automatically create the service’s response parameters by clicking Populate Response Structure button.

Now, if you have a service that requires basic access authentication, you would simply enter the URL in the service settings:

The next step is usually to enter service request parameters and then test the service. But, when you test the service, the service will fail with a message like this:

Why does it fail? When you use a URL such as: https://username:password@www.host.com/products, basic access authentication is only supported by the Web browser. When you test the URL inside Appery.io, it does a regular GET request, without the basic access authentication and the service fails. When you run the actual app, everything should work, as request will be coming from the Web browser. We are looking at how to update the test feature to support basic access authentication.

What if you still want to create the service response parameters automatically? That’s still pretty easy to do. Run the service in Web browser. Copy the output. Open Response Parameters panel in service editor. Click Populate from Sample Response. Paste the response. Click Populate Response Parameters. That’s it. Again, keep in mind that when running the mobile app, everything will be working.