Today, Backendless is excited to announce the release of the Backendless SDK for Flutter. With this SDK, you can quickly and easily integrate your Backendless server-side with your Flutter application. If you’re new to Backendless, start your free trial today to see how easy it is to integrate the most complete backend as a service platform available with your Flutter app.

Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework originally created by Google for developing apps for Android and iOS. The Backendless SDK for Flutter currently supports Android only, with iOS support coming soon.

In this edition of Backendless Spotlight, we travel down under to take a look at EatClub, an Australian app designed to make dining out more convenient – and less expensive. EatClub encourages you to “eat out, more often” by providing a platform for restaurants to offer last-minute deals on unfilled reservations. Unlike our previous entries which utilize Backendless Cloud, EatClub runs their backend on Backendless Pro, discusses further below. EatClub is available on iOS and Android. You can learn more about them at the EatClub 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.

One of the final steps before you release an app is to setup proper security. Specifically, the security of your File Storage is perhaps the most important since it may contain your business logic code, your public website data, your logs, and any other assets which you probably do not want anyone from the outside to be able to see. This post will provide a few guidelines on how to structure your File Storage with security in mind and instructions on how to set up the permissions properly. The sample use-case will be a bit over-concerned with security, so you most likely won’t need all of this for your specific case, but you’ll be aware of what to do in the worst case.

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.