Backend

As A

Service

Overview

  • The Why of Servers
  • Architecture and components
  • Installfest!
  • Simple verification of functionality
  • Refactor glossary page to use BaaS

Why do servers exist?

Why do servers exist?

  • stuff that's too much for a phone or laptop
  • stuff that needs to be shared among many people


  • Information (data)
  • Calculation (processing)
  • Authentication (identity)
  • Persistance (storage)
  • Printing/fabrication

To provide services

DIY

  • Most flexible
  • Exactly what you need
  • Requires dev time
  • Dev/operating cost
  • Smaller testing pool

 

  • requires backend dev talent

Buy

  • Predesigned but customizable
  • Offers what most people need
  • Requires learning time
  • Subscription/usage cost
  • Larger testing pool

Choice

  • Defined services that address one/more markets
    • Mobile apps
    • Clientside web apps
    • API as a business (See http://www.programmableweb.com/)
  • Often based on open source code
  • Free accounts have limited security/capacity
  • Paid accounts have more features/capacity
  • Scale up by paying for more transfers/data
  • At some point, it may be cheaper to DIY

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Backend_as_a_service

BaaS

  • Sign up for the service
  • Install Software Development Kit (SDK)
  • Integrate SDK into your application
  • Write your application to use the appropriate API
    • API = Application Programming Interface
    • A library of objects written in your language for your environment
  • Let the API talk to the service

How To

Architecture

REST APIs

  • Entity - a thing that can be stored or retrieved
  • Collection - an array of entities
  • URL are nouns
  • HTTP supplies the verbs
  • Each new entity gets a universally unique ID

www.domain.com/collection/entity

POST /word - write a new word

GET /word/uuid - read an existing word

GET /words - read all the words

JavaScript API

All the functionality is abstracted and encapsulated in an object

var options = {...};
var client 
   = new Usergrid.Client(options, function(){...});

client.createEntity(options, function(){...});

client.getEntity(options, function(){...});

 

You use the object's methods to access the service

http://apigee.com/docs/api-baas/content/sdks

 

 

Installfest

http://apigee.com/docs/app-services/content/installing-apigee-sdk-javascript 

  1. Sign up for an account
  2. Download JavaScript SDK
  3. Create a repo for an example
  4. Copy the JS API library to the repo

Sign up

https://accounts.apigee.com/accounts/sign_up

Dashboard

https://accounts.apigee.com/accounts/dashboard#/

Organization

https://apigee.com/appservices/#!/org-overview

JS SDK

http://apigee.com/docs/api-baas/content/sdks#javascript

Make a repo

After downloading SDK and putting it on Desktop...

$ cd ~/Dropbox/pcs
$ mkdir afe-apigee-sdk-demo
$ cd afe-apigee-sdk-demo/
$ mkdir js
$ cp -R ~/Desktop/apigee-javascript-sdk-2.0.9 js
$ touch js/main.js
$ touch index.html
$ touch readme.md
$ git init
$ git add -A
$ git commit -m"initial commit with Apigee JS SDK"

Make HTML

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Does it work?</title>
    <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.3.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-migrate-1.2.1.min.js"></script>
    <script src="js/apigee-javascript-sdk-2.0.9/apigee.js"></script>
    <script src="js/main.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Does it work?</h1>
    <div class="result">
      <div id="response"></div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Make JS 

  
// in main.js, in a function

var client = new Usergrid.Client({
   orgName:"XXXXXXXX", // use your organization
   appName:"sandbox",
   logging: true,
   buildCurl: true
  });

Get your organization from dashboard.

Create the API object

Make more JS 

var options = {
    type:"entry",
    word: "foo",
    def: "See 'bar'."
  };

client.createEntity(options, function(error, result){
    if(error) {
      console.log("There was an error!");
    } else {
      console.log("It worked!");
    }
  });

Use the API object

Verify

Verify

Code Frenzy!

Use the API & entities to update the DOM.

 

Follow along with the coder...

Assignment

1. Refactor the glossary web app 

 

First: store/retrieve the whole dictionary

Optional: store/retrieve words/definitions

 

2. Refactor the Kittens web app

Next week...

Image uploads to Apigee

 

Style guides

 

Kitten site demos

 

Retrospective

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