Backend as a Service Blog kinvey-features

Last week, Facebook announced their Technology Partners Program, and we are thrilled to be one of the 11 companies selected to be a part of it. To cheer this partnership, we created an eBook titled, “The Developer’s Guide to Facebook Open Graph.” The eBook walks through a trio of apps that have had great success with the Open Graph, as well as describes how Kinvey can help developers build native mobile apps that integrate with OG.

We’re happy to officially announce the new Kinvey dev center, with improved documentation, easy navigation, fresh designs and a whole bunch of resources to help you get started building an app on Kinvey. We asked ourselves, “What makes a great dev center?” Then worked backwards from there.

We are happy to announce that we are openly giving developers the ability to code and run their own Business Logic. With Business Logic, you can run JavaScript code inside your Kinvey backend, giving you PaaS-like capabilities without having to code an entire backed.

Facebook Open Graph allows web apps to bring social context and discovery to apps. But its dependency on web backends creates a significant “missing link” that prevents the vast and increasing amounts of user activity happening via native mobile apps on Open Graph. Kinvey fills that mobile app gap by making it possible for your native app to work instantly with Facebook Open Graph.

Our integration with Facebook, available today, is the first solution that enables all developers — even those without deep pockets or big teams — to connect their native mobile apps with Open Graph. If you are an individual developer or part of a dev shop, Kinvey is your ticket to Zuckerberg’s grand vision of “building an entirely new class of social apps.”

Ever worried about capturing real-world relationships in your data? Establishing a useful data model for physical entities in the real world usually comes with the natural need to express relationships between these entities.

 App development can be tough when going it alone – there’s a lot of work to do, and many hands will make the load a lot lighter as your app grows. Getting collaborators involved in app development is a key part of building great, successful apps, and so we’ve made that easy and free to do inside of Kinvey.

Do you ever worry about how painful it is for users to create unique usernames and remember passwords just for your app? Strong passwords are almost impossible to remember, shared passwords create a huge vulnerability, and weak passwords are of no good use. Plus, many users are turned off by the effort it takes to provide basic profile information for an app.

One of the technology choices that we made early on at Kinvey was to use a NoSQL data store to support our data service. We picked MongoDB because we felt that it provided not only the flexibility that we needed, but also a rich and powerful query language that would allow our customers to efficiently store and retrieve data from their app backends.

Fast Company recently posted an article highlighting some app developers’ worries: 5 Things That Keep App Developers Up At Night. Spoiler alert – the five things listed are:

• A Tech Titan Moves In
• Buggy Updates
• API Anxiety
• Platform Shifts
• Tracking The Numbers

Having written some apps, I totally understand these concerns. They are all dealing with things out of your control, and can hurt the app and your business. Thankfully, developing your app with a Backend as a Service (BaaS) platform eliminates these concerns and issues.