2.4 - Technology underpinnings - software
- Sam Stephens (Unlicensed)
Overview:
In this section we review some of the key technology underpinnings of the BlinkMobile Platform and what technologies we advocate using at each level of your solution delivery. Most of the technologies that we bring together are based on Open Source projects which we host and make more accessible.
App/Client development & deployment
We host GitLab which provides a rich set of developer tools including Git repository management, issue tracking, code review, an IDE, activity streams, wikis, and more.
Hybrid development is at the core of our solutions. You can use any web development framework to build your web apps. These could include Angular, Ionic, React etc. Developers need to be capable with JavaScript, HTML5/CSS3 to get the best results.
If you use our Enterprise Forms Builder and App Templates then they are currently focused towards Angular. We will provide support for other frameworks in the future.
You can deploy any web app code developed in any framework using the Web Client Deploy CLI to our robust and scalable Web Client Hosting Service which is fronted by a CDN of Apache Traffic Server talking to AWS S3.
When you use the Hybrid App Buildbot CLI to create native code around your Web App development it is driving Cordova. We also curate and support Cordova Plug-ins to be used with apps developed with the BlinkMobile Platform.
API deployment and mBaaS services
Server side code to be deployed as APIs through the Server API Deploy CLI must be written with Node.JS. It is still possible to write PHP APIs to be hosted in the BlinkMobile Platform but we suggest that these will not have the same long-term support as Node.JS.
We use the Serverless Framework to interface to the AWS Lambda Execution Service to execute the Node.JS APIs.
Utility services used through BlinkMobile mBaaS Services are accessed through REST-ful web services.
Integration
Event Bus and IoT
We use BusMQ and Redis to provide Event-bus and queueing features and are working with the AWS IoT Platform to deliver higher level Event-driven services to applications.
Analytics
Analytics Data builds steadily. We support a MongoDB cluster for recent data and as it ages it is moved to AWS S3 and finally into AWS Glacier.