MBaaS No Longer Solves My Problem
Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) has been around since 2011. Its purpose was to solve specific mobile developers problems such as cloud based data storage, user authentication and push notifications. These were difficult problems to solve in 2011 and the success of MBaaS was in part due to a few reasons:
- Typically mobile developers were front-end without back-end experience
- RESTful API’s were not common or mature
MBaaS platforms such as Parse and Firebase, solved these specific problems and provided a nice RESTful API and/or SDK. Allowing the mobile developer to easily integrate.
Fast forward to 2016 and mobile developers have a completely different problem. RESTful interfaces are everywhere. A mobile developer has to code against them all in a efficient way being sure to take into account both network requests and concurrency. To give an example of this problem, on a recent eCommerce app I worked on we had to integrate with the following 6 API’s:
- Hybris eCommerce Platform
- Salesforce
- Parse
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Marketing Cloud
- and One Custom Build API
These web services provide full product catalogue information, customer authentication, store lookup and SMS messaging and analytics. It’s a real challenge to architect this communication so that the app gets the data it needs when it needs it. On top of this we needed to integrate with Parse which only exacerbates the issue by providing yet another set of services that have to be orchestrated in order to deliver the full app experience.
Therefore, the challenge for mobile developers is not the need for new services but to orchestrate the existing systems and make them work efficiently in a mobile context. Many apps being built have no choice but to build upon these legacy web services to integrate their app, after all that is where the data lives. Often apps need to make three or four expensive web requests to pull down all the data required to fulfil the user’s request and populate the UI.
The orchestration of these API’s needs to be a core part of any future MBaaS product, where app developers can bring their existing web services together by selecting them from a library of pre-integrations.
The product I’m working on at the moment solves this problem. It’s name is RedConnect, and it comes pre-integrated with many existing API’s. It allows you to build the backend for your app by bringing your existing web services together in one place. RedConnect then uses flow based programming which is a visual programming language to combine the api requests. These API’s can then flow to extract the required data from each service.
Now a mobile developer makes a request to the RedConnect app simplifying their development.
If you want to take a closer look at RedConnect, then you can get started for free:
