Backend as a Service Blog Kinvey's Posts

The new version of Kinvey’s JavaScript Library released today comes with two new features: caching and offline support. For years, web developers could rely on users having a permanent network connection. However, the shift towards mobile made this assumption no longer true. Instead, users often are connected through slow or unreliable networks, or not connected at all. Yet, it is critically important for your app to work under any circumstance. 

About a month ago I wrote about how the Kinvey JavaScript Library added support for Android Browser 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 3.2 (Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, respectively. Hungry yet?) In this blog post, I will explain in great detail what issues we encountered, and how we managed to work around them. The techniques presented here are applicable not only to the Kinvey JavaScript Library. Writing JavaScript for the Android Browser? Read on to learn how to provide proper support for performing cross-domain AJAX requests.

We encountered issues with the Android Browser while running the Kinvey JavaScript Library test suite against the browser. A number of tests failed unexpectedly. To us, this once again confirmed having a test suite in place does not only discover issues with code, but also with the environment it is running on. After diving into the code and inspecting network traffic, we were able to identify two problems.

So about an hour ago, I heard about this #failedTechBands thing.  Basically, people on twitter are using the hastag #failedTechBands – to mash together some kind of technology, and a band/musician to make a pun.

I’m a huge fan of obscure music, and goofy humor – so I hopped right in:

Yea, mine aren’t the best… but I had to get in on that action.  

Here are the top 10 that I’ve seen so far today (Feel free to post your own in the comments) :

A new release of the Kinvey JavaScript Library is now available for download. Since the first release, we have been working hard to improve the library, so it’s even easier to use. Let me walk you through what exactly changed and how this will impact your projects. Note this release, version 0.9.3, is a beta release, so it’s under heavy development.

The documentation has been updated to reflect the latest release. In case you are working with PhoneGap to create a hybrid app, there now is a tutorial available on how to use PhoneGap with Kinvey.

As of today, the Kinvey JavaScript Library is officially available for use in your HTML5 apps and node.js projects. You can download the library here. This first release is a beta release, so expect lots of new features to be added soon.

Trends

Over the recent months, we noticed that a lot of developers are using Kinvey as their backend for HTML5 applications. Also, there is an increasing trend in the usage of server-side JavaScript platforms, especially node.js. So far, developers working with JavaScript could only use our REST API to connect to Kinvey.

However, manually building REST calls is no fun. It requires you to deal with users, authorization, encoding issues, formatting and parsing requests and response bodies, and so on. JavaScript libraries, like jQuery and Backbone.js, can take care of some of the work, but not all. You are still required to do some of the hard work, like creating users in the Kinvey backend, or querying a collection.

Sravish Sridhar of Kinvey Skypes in to tell us about the unique challenges startups face and life in Boston post-TechStars. We also air a fun clip from SxSW Interactive of David Cohen hanging out with a robot dinosaur.

 
I lived in Austin for 12 years, and not only is SXSW my favorite thing that happens in Austin… it’s my favorite thing that happens period.  If I were to somehow win a trip around the world on Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy, and it was scheduled during SXSW, I’d have to say “naw, I’m good.”

The only year that there was any question if I was going to go or not was my Freshman year in college.  I went to college at The University of Texas at Austin – just blocks away from the epicenter of SXSW.  The organizers of the festival have wisely timed SXSW to coincide with the Texas colleges’ spring breaks, so I was left with the decision between South Padre Island and its infamous college kid debauchery – or a Multimedia/Film/Music festival I knew little about. (SXSW interactive was called “multimedia” at the time). I took a chance and decided to stay in Austin, even though it meant I’d have to sleep on a friend’s couch as the dorms were closed during spring break.

Although RubyRiot was held a week ago, and Sravish already blogged about the usage of the official RubyRiot app made by Kinvey here, I will revisit the app one more time. As you know, the app is available for both iOS and Android. However, it originally started out as an HTML5 app. 

Instead of developing two separate versions, we decided to code a large part of the desired functionalities in HTML5. This way, we avoided coding the same functionalities twice, while still being sure they worked across platforms. Eventually, we had to hybridize the app due to constraints with the HTML5 platform. For example, implementing push notifications requires a native approach. Also, we had to circumvent Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) issues with the Twitter API.

To get to know how to convert your Kinvey app to a hybrid one to really make it shine, read on. Different phases are discussed in separate sections.

Calling all Android developers in Boston this weekend! Tomorrow, February 18th at 11AM at WorkBar, we will be co-hosting a hackathon with Viximo. The Vixivey Hackathon (Viximo + Kinvey = Viximo!) is your chance to hang out with other cool developers, coding away and building awesome mobile apps. Try out some brand new mobile dev tools that are not yet publicly available and bring your mobile app to the next level by adding social network and cloud service hooks.

A week ago Morgan and I went to the Facebook Hackathon event in Boston. A large part of the day was reserved for hacking together a mobile app which leveraged the power of the improved Facebook OpenGraph API. Morgan and I decided to create an HTML5 application which stored all of its data in Kinvey. Users could then register through Facebook, after which a new user item was added to the backend.

On subsequent requests, we checked whether the user was already logged in on Facebook, avoiding duplicate signups. However, we also needed to check whether the Kinvey backend already contained this user. At the same time, we could not render any content, since we needed valid user credentials from Kinvey first.