In this article, we will show you how to write a service that will backup your application data with a time interval you specify. To do this, we will be using custom business logic, a timer, and the console SDK.

The result of this operation will be an archive with the data of all your tables (or, if you wish, you can modify the service for backing up specific individual tables, geo-points, application settings, etc.).

Today we are going to demonstrate how to create and save new data objects using the very convenient REST Console in Backendless. We will start by opening our Backendless application and navigating to the REST Console. To do this, go to the Backendless Console and select the Data tab.

In this edition of Backendless Spotlight, we visit the Pacific Northwest where a group of local leaders have created an app to guide tourists through an historically significant part of Tacoma, Washington, known as Japantown. The app provides a map with important landmarks and places of interest, historic and modern photos of each location, and links to essays and notes compiled by historian Michael Sullivan and writer Tamiko Nimura. You can download the app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know have an app using Backendless and would like to be considered for a future Backendless Spotlight, we want to hear from you! Send us an email with a link to the app or website and a description of how Backendless has helped them be successful.

Today we’re going to take another look at security configurations in Backendless. In this article, we will talk about how to restrict direct access to your data via API and only expose your custom API endpoints. This does not mean you should use some other set of “admin” APIs for data management. Instead, it is accomplished by setting up proper security settings.

Backendless provides ways to set up really granular permissions for your resources, including even row-level security in your data tables. But for this task, we’re only going to need system roles and global permissions. Thus, it won’t require you to do a lot of configurations or create additional assets, such as custom roles.

Today we are going to walk you through the process of allowing users to register and log into your app using their Google account. The best way to showcase this is to walk though the Registration and Login example app available in the Code Generation section of your Backendless Console.

Have you ever wondered why is it often so tedious so make your simple Java app a web server, with the methods becoming the endpoints? You need to add libraries, write additional “web” wrappers, set up a server and a hosting, configure load balancing and much, much more. Do you really have to go through all these things when you just want this piece of code be available via the Web so that others can invoke it and get some fancy results?

The good news is that nowadays this is much less of a problem: with services like Backendless, it is easy to transform your custom code into a real REST service available via both REST and JS/iOS/Android/Java APIs. If needed, authentication also comes available out-of-the-box. It is worth noting that this is all for no charge except for the number of API services you may have and the number of API calls you’ll make to the service in a month.

In this article, we’ll show you how to make your HelloWorld app really say Hello to the whole World.

As you may have noticed in our release history, the EXTENDED STRING data type was removed almost a year ago. To be precise, it was more a merge of the STRING and EXTENDED STRING data than the removal of the latter. This means now you can safely use STRING data type for any kind of characters (including emoji! ????) without worrying if the column would support it. In addition, the sorting order for multiple non-Latin languages has been fixed automatically.

Relieving developers from the hassle of two string types has always been one of our main goals, and this is another small step in that direction.

In this post, I’ll explain our reasoning for introducing the somewhat confusing EXTENDED STRING data type earlier and how we managed to finally solve the initial problem with no additional complication for the developers using our platform.

In this edition of Backendless Spotlight, we take a dive into a business-supporting mobile software company called Inkscreen and their application CAPTOR. CAPTOR by Inkscreen “enables the secure capture and management of sensitive business-related content—scanned documents and photos, and video/audio recordings.” You can learn more about CAPTOR by visiting the Inkscreen’s website.

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know have an app using Backendless for its backend and would like to be considered for a future Backendless Spotlight, we want to hear from you! Send us an email with a link to the app or website and a description of how Backendless has helped them be successful.

Recently we published an article titled “How to Enable Push Notifications Using Backendless in a React Native App (Android)”. Now we are going to continue demonstrating how to enable push notifications, this time for iOS devices. If you missed that article, we recommend you to read it first as there we implemented a basic React Native setup and configured a Backendless App. All the code what we used in the previous article can be found on this github repo. In the repo, there are several commits to separate the main steps. We will use this commit as an entry point for today’s article.

In a previous article (How to Save an Object with All the Children in a Single Call to Server), we examined how to simply save an object model. However, Backendless custom services give us much more flexibility when it comes to saving objects. In this article, we are going to cover how to perform complex business logic actions such as saving an object with calculated information in one API call using custom services. As we’ll demonstrate in this example, you can actually encapsulate entire portions of your business logic on the server side.

For this example, we will build a custom service that will emulate the order process for an automotive technician service station.