Backend as a Service Blog html5

In Kinvey’s eBook, titled “A Multi-Tool Mashup for Accelerating HTML5 Development,” CTO Morgan Bickle explains how he brought together a few existing tools created by influential web and mobile developers to create his own HTML5 project builder that enables quick website development. Here’s an excerpt from the eBook, explaining why tools matter in HTML5 development.

As of recently, the W3C standards body considers HTML5 feature-complete. We expect to see HTML5 adoption rise in the coming years. In today’s Kinvey eBook, our CTO Morgan Bickle explains how he cobbled together a few existing projects created by influential web and mobile developers to create his own HTML5 project builder that enables quick website development.

HTML5. We have seen articles upon articles about it, some people love it, some people are turned off by it (like Zuckerberg). However, it’s something that is here. Now. Something that you see every day, whether it be that iOS app, the registration form you filled out or the files you uploaded via simple drag and drop. HTML5 sits behind the scenes performing magic wonders that many give no second thought to and just assume as standard.

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. 

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.

This post explores a tool I’ve been hacking on that helps you get started quickly building HTML5 apps and includes Kinvey’s latest Javascript library. The tool can be useful to anyone building HTML5 apps and doesn’t require the use of Kinvey.

You can find the GitHub repo here and see a screencast of installing the tool and creating an HTML5 project at the bottom of the post.

It started over the weekend when a customer contacted us regarding HTML5 support. I exchanged some messages with him about his application needs and provided him with a beta version of the Kinvey JavaScript library. Then on Monday, I was talking with Dave W. from our team and we came up with the idea for this tool.

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.

Backbone, backed by Kinvey

A couple weeks back we took a look at how to hook up your web frontend to your mobile backend using Backbone.js and Kinvey. If you haven’t done so already, check out that post for tips on getting started with Backbone.js and Kinvey.

Today, we will expand on that post by developing our very own YATLA (Yet Another Todo List App ). For added flavor, lets throw some Coffeescript into the mix as well!

For the complete example source code, check out this tutorial’s repository.

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.

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.