GMO application cloud (GMO mBaaS) powered by Backendless – a mobile Backend-as-a-Service provided by Backendless Corp. and customized for the Japanese application development market is fully available as of today.
The service is a result of a successful partnership between Backendless Corp. and GMO Internet Group – one of the most comprehensive providers of industry-leading Internet Services in Japan. This partnership started last year just after completion of the Group’s precise exploration of mBaaS market offerings. Backendless surpassed the competitors’ proposals by the criteria of reliability, feature set, simplicity and flexibility as well as by various aspect of data security issues. The partnership gave birth to a new service by GMO Internet which has been already available in public free Beta version from January 2015 in Japan.
The official release of GMO mBaaS provides a broad set of the Mobile Application Development Platform features powered by the Backendless Platform. In conjunction with other features and services of GMO, the provider emphasizes multi-platform SDKs, a complete package of the backend functionality, powerful push notification capabilities and media streaming, custom logic functionality for customization of the mBaaS features.
Up until now the only way to experience and build apps with Backendless was our online service. Anyone can register with it for free, download client-side SDKs and build the best of the breed mobile apps. Things are going to change as we expand the reach of our platform so it can run right on your own machine, in your data center or a private cloud. So starting today Backendless is everywhere and Backendless is one. The standalone version of the Backendless Platform is also known as Backendless Enterprise comes in a variety of installers, virtual machines and cloud images available for free download today.
The Backendless Enterprise packaging and the free-to-download format allow on-premise or private cloud installation. Application developers and organizations can take full advantage of the Backendless Platform power with the total control of the application infrastructure, data, workflows and IT procedures. And all these benefits are obtained by Backendless Enterprise users without any dependency on the public cloud!
The Backendless Enterprise feature-set is identical to the Online version of Backendless. Your applications can rely on the powerful data persistence and app user management APIs, leverage file storage, deliver push notifications, exchange publish/subscribe messages and deploy custom business logic.
To get started with the product see the Backendless Enterprise Quick Start Guide.
For licensing inquiries, contact Backendless Sales.
Enjoy!
In my previous post I described how data tables in Backendless map to the client-side classes whose instances contain persisted data objects. However, there are scenarios when the default mapping is undesirable. In that case, Backendless client libraries provide an API to override the mapping. For example, consider the following data table (Restaurant):
It may already be obvious if you had followed this blog series. Data tables created in Backendless and the client-side classes you write or obtain through Backendless code generation, have a direct correlation. By default a table and the corresponding client-side class have the same name. This is true for all Backendless SDKs which support object-oriented data access. This includes Android, Java, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, ActionScript and .NET. For example, consider the following data table:
Previously I described how to save data objects using REST Console. The same interface allows to save objects with related data – it is strictly a matter of formatting the request body. Consider the following two data table schemas:
Backendless REST Console is a tool capable of driving REST queries against Data Service. It is useful when you need to validate a REST command or for testing and diagnostics purposes. REST Console is available in a dedicated tab on the Data screen of the Backendless Console. Previously I wrote how to load data objects using REST Console and how to save a new data object. In this post I will describe the API to delete a data object.
The custom business logic feature in Backendless lets you add your own server-side code to handle client API requests. In this post I am going to review how to add the Data Service API handlers.
With that type of handler you can intercept and add additional logic for the APIs which store data in Backendless, run queries, update or delete data objects.
The easiest way to start building server-side Backendless code is the developer console. Login to your account, select an app and click the Business Logic icon. I assume there are some data tables in your backend, if not, make sure to create a few. Since we are going to add an event handler which works with persistent data, click Data Tables from the list of available handler categories. Click Add Event Handler, the screen should look as shown below:
Previously I wrote how to generate custom business logic code for API event handlers and how to locally debug your custom code. Now your code is ready to be pushed to the Backendless servers. Once it is out there, the Backendless infrastructure automatically handles scaling the code execution and routing requests to an instance available to run your code. The process for deploying an API event handler is very similar to the one for timers (see deploying custom business logic in timers to Backendless).
The ZIP file you downloaded from the Backendless Console (when it generated the code for an event handler) includes the deploying utility located in the /bin directory. To deploy the code, open a command prompt window and run the Deploy script. There are two of them, one for Linux (Deploy.sh) and the other for Windows (Deploy.bat). When you run the utility, it inspects all the custom code, packages and deploys it to the Backendless servers. The utility output would look similar to the one below:
Previously I wrote about the REST Console, which is a part of the Backendless Console. It is a versatile interface which lets you perform a complete CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) set of operations on your data stored in Backendless using the REST interface. One of my previous articles described how to use the REST Console to perform search queries (that’s the Retrieve part of CRUD). In this post I am going to demonstrate how to save new data objects using the REST Console.
Consider the following data table schema:
Previously I described how to use the Backendless Console to generate custom business logic code. In this post I will describe one of the most amazing features in Backendless – an ability to debug custom server-side code on the developer computer before deploying it to the cloud. It would be very helpful for you to go through the previous feature to establish the surrounding context.
Once the code is generated, you can use the Download button to get a project archive (zip) with all the source code. In addition to the code the archive also contains a special command line utility which you can use to run the custom code locally. The trick of the local execution is the code inject itself into the API processing chain. This happens despite the fact that the API invocation is handled in the cloud, but the custom code runs on your computer. To put things in perspective, see the diagram below:
