If you have any smart IoT devices in your home or office and tried controlling them with Alexa, you might wonder how it actually works. In this guide, you will learn about building a custom Alexa skill that will let you control a wi-fi enabled light bulb with Alexa. You will be able to turn…
Happy New Year, everyone! Here at Backendless, we hear a lot of cool and interesting stories about people using our technology to build awesome things. Every now and then we come across some truly inspiring ones. Here is a story of Mudasar Javed, a 16 year old developer from Australia who launched a social network…
This post describes the process of developing an API Service in Backendless with JavaScript. You will learn: how configure your development environment include NPM dependencies run the service in the debug mode and test it using the Backendless console deploy the service to Backendless The service you will develop in this guide will provide APIs for…
This is Part 2 of the article about developing an Amazon Alexa skill without any coding. In Part 1, you learned the following: How to create a Codeless API Service responsible for handling Amazon Alexa requests. The service completely removes the need for adding AWS Lambda functions and runs without any cost in the free plan of…
Backendless Pro, the standalone version of Backendless, is now officially released and is available for download. The new release includes the latest version of the Backendless Platform. Version 4, which was originally launched only for the Backendless Cloud product, is a major improvement over the previous version. The version 4 release includes: Completely redesigned Backendless…
Performing a calculation on a group of database objects may be a complex task. For example, to calculate the sum of all orders for a customer would require retrieving all that customer’s orders then iterating over them to calculate the mathematical sum of all amounts. This was yesterday! As of Backendless 4.4.0, you can use aggregate functions…
As we announced earlier, we have discontinued the free plan in 3.x. We wrote about it on our blog as well as email newsletters. If your application was on the free plan in Backendless 3.x, you can either migrate it to Backendless 4 (which has a free plan and that is not going anywhere) or you…
Backendless Push Notifications are getting a much-needed facelift. Today, with the release of version 4.3.0 you will start noticing some improvements. Specifically, you will see the DeviceRegistration data table:
Backendless supports two approaches for saving data objects in the database: the class-based approach and the map/dictionary approach. With the class approach, you declare a class, instances of which represent individual objects stored in the database. With the introduction of Swift 4, it is important to add a new attribute to your Swift 4 classes….