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i.e. getting hundreds or even thousands of records with multiple relations, utility requests to delete thousands outdated records in a table, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is a service that can store a lot of data and provide a full text-based search, among other cool features. In this article, we’ll show you how to integrate Amazon ES with your Backendless project.
Save objects to Amazon ES
To save objects to the Amazon ES with Backendless you have to:
- Create an Amazon ES domain
- Create after event handlers in the Backendless console
- Download generated code
- Write JavaScript code to save objects
In one of my previous articles, I showed how to develop a custom Alexa skill using an example of a Trip Planner app (How To Build A Dialogue Custom Alexa Skill Using JavaScript (Without Lambda). In this article I will show you a more complex example of the interaction between Alexa and the user. Today will build a “Guess My Number” game where Alexa (or technically the skill) thinks of a number and the user tries to guess it while the skills suggests whether it is lower or higher. Here’s a sample dialogue a user may have with Alexa once you implement the skill:
What does “mobile-to-web cross login with a QR code” mean ? It is one of the approaches for the two-factor authentication. Suppose that a user is already authenticated in your application (in my example it would be an android app) and the user wants to use it’s actual session to perform an automatic authentication in another application (in my case it’s a web app). There are several examples of popular apps which use this approach. For example, to login into a web session with WhatsАpp, you must login on your phone and then scan a QR code in the web interface.
Backendless 5 is now released (hooray!) and it offers a bunch of new powerful capabilities. One of them is support for development of custom Amazon Alexa Skills. In this post I am going to demonstrate how easy it is to create a custom skill using JavaScript. You will learn how to control the dialogue flow between the user and Alexa using Backendless and custom Cloud Code.
An example we will build a trip planner skill, albeit a trivialized version of it, which will gather from the user the departure date, the departure and arrival cities. The collected information can be used to search available fares, hotels and make any other necessary arrangements.
What You Will Need
- An Amazon Developer Account
- A Backendless Developer Account and App
- Install SDK for Amazon Alexa from Backendless Marketplace
Today we will talk about how to monitor client’s Real-Time Connections in your Angular application. This tutorial continues the guide on how to build Angular apps with Backendless. It is recommended to check out the previous article in this series before you continue for the reason that we will use the application from the previous post as the starting point for this tutorial. Alternatively, if you just want to start working with the it right away, just download the source code from this GitHub commit.
In many cases we want to see how many application users are online or offline, for example, it might be useful in a chat application. For the demo purposes, in our application we will add a simple counter for count all connected clients. As we explore adding that functionality, you will meet with Backendless Business Logic, Backendless Counters, Codeless and keep discovering Real-Time features:
Great news, guys! Backendless 5 is now released and it’s time to show you some new features we’ve been working on. In this article we will talk about how to integrate the Backendless Real-Time Database into your Angular application. Meanwhile, you can check out the previous version of our Angular app in this post. In case you haven’t read the post and don’t have that app yet, please review the previous article, because we will use that application as a starting point for this tutorial. Or, if you just want to start working with the it right away, just download the source code from this GitHub commit.
