I’ve been searching all day for a good and similar alternative for Parse, since it’s shutting down.
Backendless seems like a good option! Mostly because it hosts so much more support features.
I would like to explain the features in my app to see if it would be easy/possible to integrate with Backendless.
-Upload/Retrieve/Delete Images from cloud. Much like instagram, user uploads scaled images to the cloud to be fetched back to the user who uploaded them.
-Store setting values. User makes certain decisions in the app which will be stored in String, Booleans, Integers, Floats etc to later be downloaded in a big lump and applied to local preferences for flexibility and performance.
-User integration. I want users to be able to (under certain circumstances) view other users data/images. E.g Snapchat, a friend request and suddenly you can start viewing their Snap story.
Other things, I use Libgdx framework for cross platform capability. Which in turn uses RoboVM. How will I be able to integrate server connections etc with RoboVM code? My whole app (Android & IOS) will be in Java.
Thanks in advance. Looking forward to possibly become a member!
I am also interested in this. I think most of the functionality can be covered using the REST API, but there are parts that I don’t fully understand yet, like login thru facebook using REST, because we cannot use the Android/Java SDK for the RoboVM project. It would be great to have clear examples on how to implement this from a cross-platform point of view (pure REST is ideal for this).
Hey guys,
Please see my answers for each item below:
-Upload/Retrieve/Delete Images from cloud. Much like instagram, user uploads scaled images to the cloud to be fetched back to the user who uploaded them.
Backendless provides File APIs for upload, deletion, copy and move operations for the files stored in Backendless Hosting. Every file has a public URL, so the download can be implemented using standard mechanisms/APIs available in any given OS.
-Store setting values. User makes certain decisions in the app which will be stored in String, Booleans, Integers, Floats etc to later be downloaded in a big lump and applied to local preferences for flexibility and performance.
There is a rich persistent system. You can create a class in Android/iOS/JS/.NET and when you save instances of that class using our API, Backendless will store that object in a corresponding table (the table will be created on the fly if it didn’t exist).
-User integration. I want users to be able to (under certain circumstances) view other users data/images. E.g Snapchat, a friend request and suddenly you can start viewing their Snap story.
Your app users can register using our API and will be stored in a special table called Users. Every user may have custom properties which you get to assign to users accordingly to the logic of your app. Properties are stored in the database and can be managed using Backendless Console. There is API to save and retrieve properties for any user object.
Other things, I use Libgdx framework for cross platform capability. Which in turn uses RoboVM. How will I be able to integrate server connections etc with RoboVM code? My whole app (Android & IOS) will be in Java.
I didn’t understand that question, specifically, it is not clear what you meant by “integrate server connections”
Regards,
Mark
Thanks Mark. Really appreciate the time you take answering us.
Regarding the last question:
How can we use the Backendless API without using any of the existing SDKs? I think that’s the problem with RoboVM. We cannot use the Android SDK, since it is not an Android app, although the language is Java. Do you guys have in mind releasing a pure Java SDK? Otherwise the REST API would be the way to go, but there are parts that are confusing in the documentation, for example: https://backendless.com/documentation/users/rest/users_facebook_login.htm
Thank you
Hi Tykrrang,
The SDK for Android can also be used in pure Java apps. Have you tried it?
Regards,
Mark
Mark, I haven’t tested the entire SDK, being my main goal to achieve facebook integration within my app.
Just by looking at the documentation here I can see that every method for the login feature requires
android.app.Activity contextwhich is an Android dependency. Is there an alternative?
Thank you
Facebook and twitter integration are not supported in native Java apps. What would be the use-case here? A desktop Java application that allows Facebook login? Is it what you’re after?
You can use “classic” Backendless login without a problem in pure Java apps though.
Regards,
Mark
The use-case is to have a user login (or register) with facebook, somehow link that FB user to backendless, get the users friends on FB that are also using the app, and store that so we can later combine that information with the user scores to create leaderboards.
The login through FB is covered using the vanilla SDK from Facebook, which already also has bindings that make it work with RoboVM (they call those “robopods”). Since there is no Backendless bindings for RoboVM (and there needn’t be), we need to cover that functionality using the REST API.
At this point I am not sure of how to make that “linking” happen using the REST API, so we can implement it on our own on RoboVM.
Now that I think of it, we might not need the linking at all. We can use the FB SDK to extract whatever information we need client side, then upload that to Backendless. Still, it would be great to know how this part of the Backendless REST API works.
We just added support in our dev branch for REST API supporting facebook login. It will be available in production soon.
Regards,
Mark
Great news! Will test as soon as it is available
Hi Mark. Any news on the REST API support for facebook login?
Mark, I’ve tested the REST API support for facebook successfully. Thanks.