5.1 - Server-Side Processing
- Sam Stephens (Unlicensed)
Overview:
When architecting a mobile app project, you will naturally break functionality into two main groups - client side and server side.
Client-side code is what is displayed to the user, and in most cases will be the code that orchestrates the user's experience, for anything from navigation to calling web APIs. Your app code is the hub of your project, and server side code is used for accessing remote data.
This is referred to as the middleware layer.
Middleware Layer:
The "Web APIs" as shown in the diagram above is the server-side code we're referring to here. The middleware layer allows you as an app developer to write scripts that will run server side that can keep things like API keys and connection information secret. They can be your conduit between your client side app, and a backend system. They can work as a simple proxy designed for secure backend system access, or they can contain processing logic, mapping and transformation in their own right.
Sever-Side Hosting:
These Web APIs can be hosted on the Blink Mobility Platform in two ways:
- Server API Hosting service
- BMP API Hosting service
The BMP API hosting service uses your answerSpace as a server side code hosting platform, allowing you to write server side code in PHP, and deploy onto the Blink Mobility Platform.
Deployment can be done in either of two ways:
- via the Interaction Manager (CMS)
- via the BMP CLI tool
The next sections will cover these both.
Next:
5.2 - CMS Based Server Side Code