We are happy to announce the new release of Backendless, version 5.2.0. The new release delivers completely redesigned support for push notifications. With the new release you can create highly visual, dynamic and interactive push notifications for Android and iOS devices. The content in the notifications can be personalized for each individual user, you can greet the users of your apps by name, provide content and information in the context of user’s location or any other related user properties. You can configure your push notifications to include sounds, images, configurable buttons (with inline reply) and custom vibration patterns. You can easily schedule push notifications to be delivered automatically, alternatively you can send them out with Backendless console or using the API. The video below provides an overview and a demo of the new functionality:
The mission of Backendless is to simplify the app development process. We strive to empower software developers to build apps without spending any time on monotonous and repetitive coding tasks. In most cases, a developer working with Backendless should not even think about the server-side and focus entirely on the user experience. We have seen thousands of apps getting built the standard way – that is using code. Whether it is Java, Objective-C, Swift, JS or C#, developers still write, compile, debug and profile code when building the client-side of their mobile apps. Can the process be simpler? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could build a mobile app without knowing a programming language? Or better yet, how cool would it be if you could get all the boring and annoying parts of creating a skeleton of a mobile app using an easy-to-use and a powerful UI and after that jump into the code to handle more advanced tasks at that level? Yes, that would be awesome. What’s even more awesome is that such a solution is available now and it integrates nicely with Backendless. Welcome to Dropsource – a platform for developing mobile apps without any coding. And if you want to get the code, it will generate a complete Android Studio or Xcode project for you.
As the saying goes, it is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. The video below starts with a demo of a mobile (iOS) client-server app built with Dropsource. This is a classic ToDo app which uses the Backendless database to store data and demonstrates a complete set of the database operations (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete – CRUD). Right after the demo in the video, there is a detailed walkthrough showing how to build the app. If you follow the instructions, you will be developing the same app and learn how to use Dropsource and integrate it with Backendless. Enjoy!
The Backendless Platform is built to run anywhere. We have had that vision right from the very first release of the product. Many of you are familiar with Backendless which we host in the cloud, however, exactly the same technology stack is also available as an on-premises solution, which we call Backendless Pro. With the release of version 5 of the product earlier this year, we tasked ourselves to rebuild how Backendless Pro is being distributed. Previously, it was available through a downloadable installer which led to difficulties in configuring and scaling the software. We decided to base the architecture on Docker where each component of the Backendless technology stack would be running as a separate Docker container. There are multiple benefits of this approach:
- Backendless can be distributed through DockerHub where we publish images for each components.
- Using Docker Compose we can define and run Backendless as a multi-container application.
- It is significantly easier to instrument and scale separate containers.
- Customers can easier upgrade their installations.
I am happy to report that the new Backendless Pro version 5 is now available. You are welcome to give it a try and run your own installation of Backendless Pro – the unlimited version of our platform(30 day eval licenses are automatically generated). You can find the instructions for installing and running the product on the GItHub page for Backendless Pro.
The following features are automatically included into the latest distribution:
- Real-time database
- Real-time publish/subscribe messaging
- Codeless business logic
- Build and manage API services with Java, JS or Codeless
- Push Notifications to Android and IOS
- Code generation
- User management + APIs
- File management + APIs
- Geolocation APIs
- Geofencing
Soon we will be publishing the updated documentation on Backendless Pro. Please contact us on the Backendless support forum or Slack have any questions.
This is Part 2 of a series of articles where you and I build a mobile app without any coding. The app we are working on is a ToDo app. In the previous post you did the following:
- Set up your Backendless (backend) account.
- Set up your Dropsource (frontend) account.
- Implemented (without any coding of course) application lifecycle.
- Implement the landing page for the mobile app.
In this part of the series, you will implement the following:
- The Login Page of the app.
- A page which lists all the to do tasks (the Listing page).
- Implement routing between the Login and the Listing pages.
By the end of this part of the development process, you will be able to run the application as shown in the animation below:
Let’s get started (or technically continue, since we started in the previous post).
In one of my previous articles, I showed how to develop a custom Alexa skill using an example of a Trip Planner app (How To Build A Dialogue Custom Alexa Skill Using JavaScript (Without Lambda). In this article I will show you a more complex example of the interaction between Alexa and the user. Today will build a “Guess My Number” game where Alexa (or technically the skill) thinks of a number and the user tries to guess it while the skills suggests whether it is lower or higher. Here’s a sample dialogue a user may have with Alexa once you implement the skill:
Did you know you can use the Backendless Code Generator, which is a part of Backendless Console, to easily generate a simple real-time chat application for iOS, Android and JavaScript? You get full source code and can see how to use Backendless APIs for sending text-based chat messages in real time. In this article I will describe how to modify the generated iOS application so you can send both pictures and text messages.
If you played or used Data Retrieval API in Backendless Cloud you may know that the server limits the number of objects retrieved from a table to 100 in a single call. For Managed Backendless and for Backendless Pro, this limit is configurable. In order to retrieve more than 100 objects, data paging is required. Paging greatly improves your application performance, but requires you to think how to architect your app in a certain way.
In this article I’ll describe how to get more than 100 objects, while using the minimum number of API calls, and do it without writing any code at all. Using this methodology, all that is needed to retrieve all objects from the database is a single call from the client application to the Backendless server.
Development of mobile applications generally requires two parts: the Backend and the Frontend. Of course, you could limit it only to the client-side, but if there is some data which must be stored on the server, there is no way to get around having a backend. In this series of articles, you will create a native mobile client-server application – a basic ToDo app. Backendless will take care of the backend, it gives you everything you might expecting from the server-side (user management, data persistence and scalability to name a few). And for the client side you will use the Dropsource service. In case if you are not familiar with this service, you can learn more about that from their website, but in short, it is an awesome service which lets you build native mobile apps without any coding. At the end of this series, your will have a native mobile application with the User Registration/Login screen, a screen with a listing of the ToDo items and a screen to create a new ToDo Item. Here’s a brief preview of the app along with real-time changes in the Backendless database:
Let’s go!
In this article, I will describe how to use the Backendless API to save multiple related records with one primary (parent) record in a table. All related records (children) will be stored in separate tables as a part of the same routine.
Examples of this type of requirement might be personnel records tied to a single identifier (such as an employee number), or transportation manifests tied to a single record locator.
Backendless Cloud Code officially supports Java, JavaScript and Codeless. Since Kotlin compiles to Java byte code, it is not an exception and can be used as well to build API Services, Event handlers and Timers. Check out an article by @vvsevolodovich describing how to configure your project so you can develop Cloud Code logic with Kotlin:
