In this week’s Backendless Spotlight, we are excited to introduce you to one of the many nonprofit organizations that use the Backendless platform to support their mobile presence. Help A Paw is a startup out of Bulgaria that is seeking to solve a local problem with an eye for reaching communities facing the same issue globally: helping stray animals. If you are a developer looking to make a difference for a nonprofit organization in need, please read to the end.

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, please send us an email with a link to the app or website and a description of how Backendless has helped them be successful.

The lion’s share of JavaScript developers prefer to use TypeScript in their projects as it helps avoid some problems at the assembly stage while still including many valuable features. Today we are going to share with you how to use the Backendless JS-SDK in conjunction with TypeScript in a project with a Node.js backend. Backendless JS-SDK is a fully isomorphic library and it can be used in both a browser environment and a NodeJS backend environment and in most cases it also works well in other environments like React Native, Appcelerator, etc. The JS-SDK has been designed as a plain JavaScript library, but a few years ago we added types definitions for all methods and classes, so you can use the JS-SDK in your TypeScript projects without additional settings.

ReactJS is one of the best and most popular frontend frameworks available for app builders. The barriers to entry in terms of understanding how to develop an app with ReactJS are very low, which is why many JavaScript developers choose the ReactJS library for web or mobile applications. It also works very well with a large number of data providers. Therefore, today we are beginning a series of articles about “How to use Backendless with ReactJS”. In this series, we will familiarize you with a number of Backendless features, show you how to use our real-time database with React-Redux store, show you how to deploy your app to Backendless File Storage, and demonstrate how to easily inject the JS-SDK into your ReactJS application.

If you have experience with AngularJS and would like to learn how to build an app with Backendless using that language, you can check out our previous series of articles:

• How to create a Web App using Angular and Backendless
• How to use the Backendless real-time database in your Angular app
• How to monitor real-time connections in an Angular app

In this article, as was the case with our Angular series, we will start by creating a new Backendless App and building a simple React app. Our demo app will be an Address Book app, so to get started we will show how to load and display some data from the server. In the future, we will modernize the application by adding more functionality.

Let’s get started!

In this week’s Backendless Spotlight, we bring you an Australian company that has grabbed a piece of the crypto craze by creating a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market ticker for Australia’s crypto markets. BTC Market Ticker provides users with up-to-the-second market movements on BTCMarkets.net, one of Australia’s largest crypto and blockchain asset exchanges.

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, please send us an email with a link to your app and a description of how Backendless has helped you be successful.

For this series, we are developing an iOS game called “TapMe”. As TapMe is a multiplayer game, it provides registration for the new users and login for the existing ones. In this article, we are going to demonstrate how to handle user registration and login, as well as how to store a player’s information in the database.

The source code for the game is available in the author’s personal Github repo: https://github.com/olgadanylova/TapMe.git

You can read Part 1 of this series here.

Some Backendless users choose to use REST APIs in their JavaScript projects. While many can simply use our pre-packaged JS-SDK, that SDK may not always be able to achieve the result the user is seeking. Today we’re going to show you how to build a custom and very light API client library for working with Backendless API. Some time ago, we created a simple NPM module named “backendless-request” for sending CRUD requests to the server. That package is used in all our services such as DevConsole, JSCodeRunner, JS-SDK, etc.. If you would like to see the sources of the package, you can find it on Github.

In this week’s Backendless Spotlight, we are going to introduce you to a startup company out of Beirut, Lebanon, called Lifebook. Lifebook is a mobile app and physical product company that allows users to build their own custom photo album through the app and have it printed and delivered to them as a hand-crafted, leatherbound photo album. Lifebook invites users to become “Oxpeckers” (a species of bird known for perching on large animals) and let “Oppy” the hippo guard their memories forever.

Editor’s Note: If you have an app using Backendless for its backend and would like to be considered for a future Backendless Spotlight, please send us an email with a link to your app and a description of how Backendless has helped you be successful.

For each entry in a given table, Backendless creates a unique objectId  property – this is a UUID. In some cases, you may want to have a unique ID based on a whole number. To do this, we will use Backendless Atomic Counters (you can read the documentation about Atomic Counters here). In this article, we will use JavaScript business logic to create a handler that will add a unique value before creating the object. You can then store that value in your table to provide the ID you’re looking for.

React Native helps you build a real native mobile application using JavaScript (for more information about React Native, you can check out the documentation on Github here). The Backendless JavaScript SDK (JS-SDK) already has full compatibility with React Native – just install it from NPM, require in your code, and go. But since the release of Backendless 5.2.x, having only the JS-SDK is not enough to access all the Backendless features; in some cases, we need to have access to native modules for working with certain features such as Push Notifications. We’ve therefore decided to create another module on JS for using exactly in a React Native environment. It’s a patch of sorts for JS-SDK.

In this article series, I’m going to show you how to use this additional JS module. There are will be a total of 3 articles:

• How to enable Push Notifications using Backendless in a React Native App (Android)
• How to enable Push Notifications using Backendless in a React Native App (iOS) (coming soon)
• How to customize Push Notifications using Backendless (coming soon)

Today, we get started with creating a simple Android application on React Native for receiving Push Notifications. Alright, let’s do it.

In this week’s Backendless Spotlight, we would like to introduce you to a nonprofit company that is using Backendless to support educational apps that are bringing literacy to some of the poorest countries in the world. Educators International is a U.K.-based charity that produces apps designed to help teachers in poor countries learn new instructional techniques for teaching math, reading, and other skills, and then providing a platform to assist those teachers in assessing their students’ progress.

Editor’s Note: If you have an app using Backendless for its backend and would like to be considered for a future Backendless Spotlight, please send us an email with a link to your app and a description of how Backendless has helped you be successful.