New release – New pricing plans, Video Streaming for Android, Counter and Caching APIs, REST Test Drive
I am very excited to report that we have an amazing new release with some very cool functionality ready for you. Among the new features you will find support for video streaming and broadcasting for Android, support for Atomic Counters and Caching API. Additionally, we have revised our pricing to give you more choices and more value for the money.
New Pricing Plans
We have revised our pricing plans to give you more options and value for the money. We have increased the limits of the Free plan, for example, now you get 20GB of file storage and 5 custom roles without any additional cost. Additionally, we updated the Backendless Plus plan and added some very attractive features to it. Finally, there is a new pricing plan which provides virtually unlimited capabilities with the exception of file storage space and media streams. For additional details, see the Backendless Pricing page.
Data Caching API
If your app needs to store an object or a primitive value in cache, Backendless now has a very cool Caching API. With a single line of code you can put and fetch any kind of value into/from a centralized all-memory cache. The API is completely cross-platform, it means an Android version of the app can put a Java object of a class X into cache and the iOS client can retrieve the same object, but morphed to the native instance of class X implemented in Objective-C (or Swift). The same is true for any combination of all supported SDKs: Android/Java, iOS/Mac OS X, JavaScript, .NET, ActionScript and REST(json). Check out the API documentation for more details.
Atomic Counters API
This was one of the more requested features and the idea is quite simple – provide a centralized mechanism for maintaining counters. A client application can increment, decrement or reset a counter. This API is also cross-platform – multiple heterogenous clients can access the same counter, retrieve or modify its value. See the API documentation for additional details.
REST Test Drive
Backendless Console now includes a graphical test drive module which let’s you perform REST invocations of the Data Service. The feature supports a complete set of operations (full CRUD) with some advanced options for running queries. For example, it is very easy to configure a request to handle data paging, sorting, retrieval of relations or specified object properties. The feature is available in the Data section of the console. Click Data, then the REST Console tab.
Custom Scheduled Task (Timer) Intervals
We have improved the scheduling mechanism for timers with custom business logic. Now when you configure a timer, you can specify a custom timer interval. With the free plan, a timer can run as frequently as every 60 seconds, with Backendless Plus, every 5 seconds and with the Cloud Enterprise plan, every second.
Video and Audio Streaming for Android
Video/audio broadcasting and streaming for Android apps with Backendless is now a reality. The functionality is cross-platform, meaning that Android users of your app can video chat with the iOS users. Videos recorded by iOS (or Flash) apps, can be consumed by the Android app counterpart and vice-versa. This is very exciting and makes us even more unique. We are updating the documentation and will describe the APIs in greater details on our blog and the website.
Backendless Bower Package for JS developers
If you are developing a JavaScript application and use Bower, we made it even easier to integrate Backendless into your app. You can install the Backendless package with the following command:
bower install backendless
Enjoy!