If you’ve worked with Backendless API for a while, you may occasionally run into a situation where the functionality you’d like to have isn’t readily available. One such function is the programmatic management of your application’s data tables. For instance, you may need to clear up all the data and recreate the table structure with specific columns on demand while developing your app. This article will show you how to do that and more.

This week, Backendless Spotlight takes a closer look at Live Love Cite, a mobile app built for the residents of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. The app acts as a social tool where users can post events, jobs, and items they are looking to sell on the marketplace. Live Love Cite is available on iOS and Android.

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.

The ability to send push notifications has been a key Backendless feature for quite a while, but until now, it only had a basic set of actions such as sending to all devices in a specific channel and/or to a specific device type (Android/iOS). With the last changes it has grown into a powerful tool with a bunch of very flexible and convenient functionality. Now you can:

• send push notifications for a precisely defined group of recipients using not only filters by channel/device, but also BackendlessDataQuery, which allows you to select target devices using a query to the Users  table;
• personalize your messages with smart-text – auto substitutions with the personal information from the Users  table or any other related tables;
• construct and customize the styling of your messages in a new graphical interface;
• and construct interactive messages with actions mapped to Buttons / Inline reply / Tap.

In this article, we’re going to review the first two points and in the next article the last two.

Today we are going to talk about a very valuable feature available for Managed Backendless and Backendless PRO users called Low Priority Tasks. In this article, we’ll look at how it works and what is it best used for.

Backendless custom business logic (custom event handlers and custom API services) tasks are put into a single queue and executed by a dedicated service called CodeRunner. In Backendless Cloud, these tasks do not have any kind of priority and are executed according to the task’s position in the queue. But there are cases when the CodeRunner queue is spammed with “heavy” requests which take 10 or even 20 seconds to execute, i.e. getting hundreds or even thousands of records with multiple relations, utility requests to delete thousands outdated records in a table, etc.

This week, Backendless Spotlight takes a closer look at an app designed to help those with hearing disabilities. Sound Alert listens to the sounds around you, then delivers alerts to help you feel safe, secure, and comfortable. Sound Alert can capture a wide array of sounds around the user’s connected device to help those with hearing disabilities be more aware of their surroundings. Sound Alert is available on iOS and Android.

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.

Today we are going to demonstrate how to create a simple event handler to track subscriber statistics on your various messaging channels. This gives you the ability to easily track the number of subscribers for each of your channels to help you manage channel load and gauge user interest in specific topics. Used in combination with API usage tracking, you will have a great sense of what your users are doing within your app.

To start, we will create a new application and call it Messaging_Statistics.

This is the final article in a three-part series on building a multi-user iOS game app. In part 2 of this series, we demonstrated the process of player registration, login, and storing in Backendless Database. Now, let’s take a look at counting the score for every player, creating a leaderboard, and how all of the game installations are notified when this information changes.

The source code for the game is available in the author’s personal Github repo. You can read Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here.

This week, Backendless Spotlight enters the gaming arena with Game With Me, a social app designed to help gamers connect with other gamers to play games together. Game With Me uses search filters, instant messaging, push notifications and many more Backendless features to create a platform that makes finding new gaming friends easy. Game With Me is available on iOS and Android.

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.

We are excited to announce the addition of Backendless Navigator, available today in Backendless Console! Backendless Navigator is a powerful tool that lets you quickly and easily search within Backendless Console. Navigator can be used to search functional areas (such as “API services”), search for specific functions (such as “add new data table”), or search for documentation and video tutorials.

In this article, we are going to continue developing our ReactJS web application using Backendless for the backend. This is part 4 of our series, so be sure you’ve read through parts 1-3, linked below:

• Basic project setup and render Persons List
• Create, update and delete Persons
• Enable Real-Time database

If you have already read those then read on. Otherwise, we recommend you either read read all of the previous articles and build the app step-by-step, or you can clone the app from this github repository and use this commit as a starting point. Today we will build our app for the first time and deploy it to Backendless Files.