Category: jQuery Mobile

Tiggzi And The Backend as a Service Ecosystem Map by Kinvey

Our friends at Kinvey posted an update to their really nice Backed as a Service Ecosystem map. Some call it the subway map, the Pacman map, or you can also look at it as “Where we fly map”.

Thank you to Kinvey for including Tiggzi, we really appreciate it.

Tiggzi is right there:

A lot has changed in Tiggzi in the past couple of months so I would like to offer an update. Hopefully the map can be updated.

I don’t believe Mobile SDK is the best fit for Tiggzi (and other players such Sencha and Appcelerator). Tiggzi is much more than a mobile SDK, in fact, it’s a mobile app platform (more about it below). One suggestion is to add a new line that would include Tiggzi and others such as Appcelerator.

Tiggzi is a mobile app platform, and one of its biggest components is the mobile app builder.


Drag and drop app builder

It’s a cloud-based, drag and drop builder (IDE) for creating HTML5, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap apps. As Tiggzi app builder uses jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap to create apps — it’s probably best to list it on a separate line with lines going to jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap (already exists). Again, this is just my opinion.

In early July we launched Backend Services under io.tiggzi.com. The first feature in the backend services is a cloud database.


Database features


Database web console

We are also working on Push, File storage, Server-side code, and Analytics features. I think there should be a line going from Tiggzi to BaaS line (io.tiggzi.com) – similar to Sencha’s connection to Sencha.io.

To summarize, this is Tiggzi mobile platform:

  • Visual UI builder (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, libraries such as jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, etc)
  • 3rd party REST API services
    • Plug-ins (pre-packaged API services and pages)
  • Backend services
    • Database
    • Push (available soon)
    • File storage (soon)
    • Server-side code (soon)
    • Analytics (soon)
  • HTML5 app hosting
  • Binary build

Building jQuery Mobile Apps With FullContact API

I attended GlueCon Hackathon in May and met Robbie Jack, Developer Evengalist from FullContact. FullContact was one of the hackathon sponsors. Once the vendor presentations were done and attendees presented their app ideas, we started chatting and Robbie told me about FullContact API. On a very high level, you give FullContact an email address (or another piece of information) and it gives you back a lot of rich social information about this user such as name, gender, location, social media profiles, photos and much much more. As we were chatting, I said, let me build an app in Tiggzi app builder that uses FullContact API. Well, Robbie was quite impressed. I built this app in front of him in about 20 minutes.

Getting FullContact API Key

As with most API’s, the first step is to sign up, register an app and get an API key. FullContact is no different, the sign up process is very simple. I signed up for the Free plan and had my API key in a few minutes.

FullContact plans

Click to sign up.

Next you create an app (mine is called Tiggzi) and you will get an API key:

FullContact app and API key

That’s it and pretty simple.

The API that we are going to use is right here and looks like this:

https://api.fullcontact.com/v2/person.json?email=name@host.com&apiKey=xxxx

For input, we are going to provide person’s email address.

Now let’s go to Tiggzi build the app that uses FullContact API.
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The New Paradigm: Cloud Services, Cloud Tools

This article was originally published in Software Developer’s Journal.

Cloud Services

In the past year or so, we have witnessed a major shift from client-server to client-cloud. This shift is primarily
fueled by two factors: mobile devices exceeding desktop computers and the thousands of different APIs available on the Internet today. What started in early 2000 on eBay and Amazon has become a real revolution in 2012 with thousands of companies, from Twitter and Facebook to AT&T, offering cloud-based services.

REST API

One of the most common ways to access private or public service APIs is via REST requests.

In the client-server approach an organization builds applications that consume its own internal content and
resources. However, even large IT organizations such as AT&T, Verizon and Amazon have come to realize that
they are no match for the social consumer and social enterprise developers out there. By making APIs publicly
available, these organizations hope that developers and “citizen developers” will come and build applications
and mobile apps on top of their services.

Citizen developers at work

Analysts at Gartner see a trend toward app creation independent of IT. They predict that by 2014, citizen developers – employees outside of IT and software development – will build 25% of new business applications. In 2007, they built less than 5%.

One of the best-known API success stories comes from Amazon: Its cloud service APIs let outsiders access
the company’s massive data centers. Twitter, with its deceptively simple 140-character message model, exploded thanks to its API. In fact, you probably read and write tweets via a Twitter application or mobile app rather
than going directly to Twitter’s Web site. Facebook’s Graph API has spawned a whole industry of apps to support its hundreds of millions of users.

Just looking at popular ProgrammableWeb site that lists close to 5,500 APIs (at the time of writing this) and 6,500 mashups or apps created that consume the various APIs. The city of San Francisco, already a mecca for startups, technology, and innovation, has made a big push into attracting developers by making city data and other date from its data.SFgov.org Web site available via API. For example, the city’s MUNI (city bus service) API is available for developers to build apps with using information about bus stations, schedules, and arrivals. Even the United States government jumped on the API bandwagon by making available data.gov, which provides public access to high-value machine-readable data sets generated by the U.S government.
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jQuery Mobile App In Tiggzi Connected to Kinvey Backend

Kinvey is one of those services that makes building mobile backend way too simple. If you combine Kinvey with a cloud-based app builder Tiggzi, you get everything you need to build an awesome mobile app using cloud services. Let me show you what I mean.

To start, sign up for Kinvey, it’s free and then create your first app backend. We re going to create a backend for beers(!).

Next, create a new collection where we are going to store names of beer we like:

Open the collection. When you open it for the first time it will be empty so we need to define at least one column and enter some data. Click on +Col, and add Name column. Then add a few sample entries by clicking +Row. You can simply double click in Name column to enter values (you don’t need to enter anything for _id or _acl).

That’s pretty much all you need to do. Simple, right?

Let’s now go to Tiggzi app builder and create a jQuery Mobile app.

We will first build the UI with jQuery Mobile:

Next, we are going to add two REST services. Once service for getting all the beers (BeerGet), and one service for creating a new beer (BeerPost).

This is BeerGet service URL:

For Kinvey to know who we are, we need to add Authorization header parameter:

Note you can also calculate the Authorization value in run time.

We can test the service to make sure it works:

Right from the Test window, we can automatically define service’s JSON output structure by clicking on Populate Response Structure button:

For BeerPost service, the service URL is the same but instead of GET we now do POST. As we also need to send the new beer name, we have to add Name request parameter:

Adding both services to the page:

Two more things we are left to do. First is to map services to UI, and second invoke the services. Let’s do the mapping.

When the page loads, we want to get the list of all current beers so we are mapping BeerGet first.

There is nothing we need to map on input (Authorization header is already set). Output mapping looks like this:

Before we can test the app, we need to invoke the service on page load.

We can test in the browser or on the actual mobile device:

Here is how it looks:

Let’s now work on adding a new beer.

Mapping BeerPost to the UI. We are getting the new beer name and mapping it to service’s input.

We don’t need to worry about mapping the response (in this example). You do get back JSON that contains the object id that was created.

Next, we need to invoke the service on button click:

The last thing we need to do is show the updated list once a beer was added. To do that, we want to invoke BeerGet service once BeerPost finished successfully. We are going to use BeerGet success event to invoke BeerGet:

Running the app:

After entering new beer:

And that’s it. Sign up for Kinvey, Tiggzi, and build your mobile app.

Create Windows Phone App with jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap and Tiggzi App Builder in 3 Easy Steps

Yesterday we attended mobile hackathon sponsored by Microsoft and PhoneGap. The goal was to build a PhoneGap app and install in on Windows Phone. We used Tiggzi App Builder, PhoneGap Build and very quickly installed an app on Windows Phone. Thanks to @jccim for inviting us and giving us a brand new Windows Phone for testing.

Step 1.

Build an HTML5/jQuery Mobile app in Tiggzi Mobile App Builder:

Step 2.

Export the app as HTML/JavaScript/CSS:

We will be adding Windows Phone support to Tiggzi in May (first source code export, followed by binary build).

Step 3.

Upload the app to PhoneGap Build, download the Windows Phone version:

You are done!

Building jQuery Mobile App with StackMob Backend API [New tutorial]

We just published a new hands-on tutorial on creating HTML5/jQuery Mobile app (can also be exported as PhoneGap app) using StackMob backend in Tiggzi app builder.

Sign up for Tiggzi Free plan today and build this mobile app.

The final app is shown below. On the first page we get a list messages we retrieved from StackMob back-end. You can also add a new message:

Click on a message takes you to second page where a message can be deleted:

This is how the first page looks in Tiggzi:

Be Your Own Enterprise Mobile Apps Powerhouse with HTML5

ReadWriteWeb published SAP Plans to Dominate Enterprise Mobile Apps with HTML5 and New Partnerships article a few days ago. SAP acquired a mobile development firm Syclo and also announced important partnerships with Appcelertaor, Adobe (PhoneGap) and Sencha to become “…most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world”.

Dan Rowinksi makes a number of very good points.

Enterprise mobile development is different from its consumer counterparts. The objectives of enterprise apps often have less to do with mobile device performance and more to do with functionality. Consumer app development often centers on games and location, testing how well an app can perform within the bounds of a mobile device’s hardware. While location is an increasingly important feature for many enterprises, communication, data management and collaboration are the real drivers in enterprise mobility.

Most enterprise or business apps are content or data-driven. More and more enterprise expose their data, content and resources via REST API services and these apps consume that data. This is the next evolution of client/server architecture or more precise, the new mobile-cloud shift. Basicially, you got a mobile app talking connected to cloud-based REST API resources. HTML5 or hybrid (PhoneGap) mobile apps are the perfect fit here.

In this type of environment, strict native applications are not always the most cost-efficient solution.

Natively supporting iOS, Android, and at least another platform Windows Phone or BlackBerry is simply a challenge and very expensive for most organizations. It’s not uncommon for a company first to release the iOS app, then after some time followed by Android, followed by mobile web and maybe Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Maintaining and updating these apps is a challenge and different versions usually have different features, with iOS version having the most features.

While it is nice to have a mobile development guru on staff that can create an app for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, those types of people are hard to find and may not be attracted to enterprise development work.

We (Exadel) have a large number of enterprise customers, and that’s exactly the problem they are facing today. Finding qualified mobile developers for different platforms is difficult.

Three companies, three strengths

SAP wants to be the mobile powerhouse by partnering with Sencha, PhoneGap (Adobe) and Appcelerator.

Sencha is the “…leading HTML5 development frameworks and can create hybrid apps for both iOS and Android. PhoneGap (Adobe) is hybrid mobile framework that makes it very easy to packaqe mobile apps as native (hybrid) apps and also gives you access to native device features. Appcelerator’s, Titanium SDK leverages JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS to create native apps with Web-based software. Note: I’m not aware of any Web-based development tools provided by Appcelerator.

Your own mobile powerhouse

But, you don’t have to be SAP to be a mobile powerhouse, there are cloud tools that make it very simple and easy to build HTML5 and hybrid (PhoneGap) apps connected to REST API services.

Cloud-based mobile app builder, with jQuery Mobile

Tiggzi is a cloud-based mobile app builder. Because it’s running in the cloud there is nothing to install or download (as opposed to Appcelerator tools which are more traditional tools and need to be installed and configured). It’s very easy to get started. It comes with a visual, drag-and-drop builder for building the UI, with jQuery Mobile and HTML5 components.

Because the builder is running the cloud, trying or testing the app is super easy. With a single click, you can open the app in browser (desktop) or on the actual device.

Hybrid apps with PhoneGap

Tiggzi also uses the simple and powerful PhoneGap framework to create hybrid apps. First, any HTML5 mobile app can be exported as PhoneGap app (iOS, Android). This this allow you to put the app into the app market. Second, in addition to just putting the app inside a native wrapper you can also invoke any of the PhoneGap’s native API. Lastly, Tiggzi comes with Android and iOS binary build (similar to PhoneGap Build). Can’t get any simpler. Build the app in Tiggzi, get iOS or Android app in seconds.

Service API’s

Enterprises have vast amount of resources exposed as REST API. Mobile apps created in Tiggzi can quickly and easily connect and consume any cloud-based REST API’s. Tiggzi comes with a powerful REST services editor where the service can be defined, tested (similar to apigee.com test console) and even its JSON response structure created automatically. Once the service is created, it is mapped to mobile UI using a visual mapper:

Mobile back-end services

If you need to create your own mobile back-end services, there are powerful and easy easy to use cloud-services such as StackMob and Parse. Anything you create in these services is instantly exposed as REST services which in turn can be consumed inside a mobile app (built in Tiggzi).

As you can see, you can easily have your own mobile powerhouse, in the cloud with Tiggzi app builder, HTML5, jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, REST API’s and mobile back-end services.