This week, Backendless Spotlight returns to the education arena as we take a look at the app My Portal, built by students for students. My Portal was built by the members of the IT Club at Daystar University in Kenya as a tool for fellow students at the university. Facing the challenges of managing the workload of a full-time college student, the creators of My Portal wanted to find a way to be better organized. Looking for a way to keep track of their schedule and academic progress, the idea for the My Portal app was born.

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.

In Java, entity objects are classes that represent data from your table. From an object-oriented perspective, these objects are built to encapsulate your data in the real-world problem domain. There are two different ways you can work with entity objects:

• Using the HashMap approach (like plain representation of column names and their values);
• Using the data binding approach, where the particular type is used for every table.

The first approach is more flexible, but it doesn’t offer security for the type values. Also, it’s possible to make a mistake setting the data. It also requires you to remember the names of the columns. 

The second approach is much more appealing in terms of the readability and understandability of the code. It also offers type safety.

The main drawback here is the necessity to write data binding objects (or entity objects if you prefer) that will represent the particular table. And what if you have a very large number of tables in your application, and every table consists of many columns? The amount of such tedious work could be significant. But don’t fret, Backendless is already doing it for you!

This is the third part of our series on using Backendless with a ReactJS frontend app. You can catch up on the previous articles here: Part 1 and Part 2. If you’d like to jump in now, you can simply create a new Backendless app, clone our previous progress from our Github.com repository, and use this commit as an entry point for today’s article.

Our goal for today is to showcase integration with our Real-Time (we call it RT) database for delivering changes in your data table from the server to the client. We have previously written about implementation of RT in an Angular app (“How to Use the Backendless Real-Time Database in Your Angular App”). If you’re interested in Angular or you just want to see difference between the usage of RT with React and Angular, we’d recommend you give that article a read.

This week, the Backendless Spotlight again travels to another part of the globe to introduce you to a company looking to help people explore the rich cultural heritage of India. Exploritage is an app for Android that provides a step-by-step, narrative audio guide for tourists visiting India. The app uses “original, authentic and detailed information” to tell the story of many of India’s greatest landmarks.

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.

When analyzing data, you may need to know the average salary of all employees, the quantity of goods in stock, the number of individual items in stock, the maximum or minimum cost, and so on. These tasks are easily handled with aggregate functions. Aggregate functions perform calculations using the values in a column in order to obtain a single resulting value.

Backendless supports several aggregate functions, such as:

• AVERAGE – to calculate the average
• COUNT – to calculate the number of rows in the query
• SUM – to calculate the sum of values
• MIN – to calculate the smallest value
• MAX – to calculate the largest value

Let’s take a closer look at how to work with aggregate functions using Backendless. In this article we will look at using aggregate functions with Backendless REST API, but we also show how to work with aggregate functions using Backendless SDK for iOS API, Backendless SDK for Android/Java API, Backendless SDK for .NET API, and Backendless SDK for JavaScript.

In the previous article in this series, we started working on a single-page application which is based on combination of ReactJS and Redux, with Backendless for the backend. If you missed that article, we recommend you to start there. If you already have a Backendless account and you are already familiar with a React/Redux stack, you can just clone our previous progress from this commit, create a new Backendless app and use it as an entry point for today’s article. Let me describe the main goal for this article and what we plan to cover:

• Create a separate component for our persons list,
• Add a PersonsEditor  for creating and updating persons,
• And add an ability to delete Persons.

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.