A brief look at IBM MobileFirst Platform

The ever increasing role of mobile devices in both personal and corporate spheres has pushed companies to come up with a wide range of ideas. There are many perceived challenges and each company has its own set of strategies based on the mobile user needs and company resources.

IBM MobileFirst covers all platforms from desktop to cloud. IBM's purchase of Worklight in 2012 and the Cloudant database as a service in 2014 were all instrumental in structuring the IBMFirst Mobile Platform .

Here is a screen shot of the slide show. It is good mix of IBM Bluemix, Worklight Platform and Cloudant (Database as service).

IBMMobile06.png

IBMMobile11&13.png

The above slides are from a slide-show by Derek Baron on IBM MobileFirst Platform

IBM's MobileFirst platform takes into consideration the needs and addresses them by its unique platform features.

How is the app doing/ does it deliver what the user wants?
    App management-Single console to manage app versions and security; Push updates to hybrid apps by passing app stores
    Operations Analytics- Diagnose device, app and version for app performance; Measure app user behavior; Monitor security issues
    In-App Feedback and Crash analysis- Troubleshoot and diagnose, bug track
    Sentiment Analysis-App store review analysis, automated analysis
 
What about mobile app security?
    User authentication-existing or 3rd party security systems (Certificate-based, touch ID, LDAP Server etc); Multi-factor authentication; Disable app version, specific user or device using console
    App Authenticity-intellectual data, back-end data
    Encrypt local data-user identity to encrypt data
    Application scanning-hunt for code vulnerabilities; offer remediation

Device's context based personalization is highly desirable
    Location engagement- rules correlating local events with other data sources
    Location Analytics - customer/employee behavior and movement patterns
    Geo-spatial enabled query- Complex Geo-spatial queries and advanced relations
    Push notifications across device platforms
App experience; storing data or integrating data
    Cloudant NoSQL DB-distributed data store
    Back-end integration-HTTP, SAP,SQL,JMS,Custom; Server-side code in Java or     JavaScript
    Use open standards (REST, OAuth)
Offline sync - Disconnected experience, simplify replicating offline

Watch the IBM MobileFirst Video here:


Get free trial here:
http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/

Riak TS and Internet of Things

Riak TS is focused to handle time series application needs. It can do fast read/write to IOT devices, there in is its strength. It also targets financial and economics data as well as in scientific research applications.

This is straight from Riak TS:
"Riak TS automatically co-locates, replicates, and distributes data across the cluster to achieve fast performance and high availability. The unique master-less architecture enables near-linear scale using commodity hardware so you can easily add capacity as your time series data grows.
"
Here is a claimed benefits of using Riak_TS from their PDF datasheet here.

This is again from Riak TS's PDF documents regarding their NoSQL database and the Basho platform.  "Basho Riak® TS is a distributed NoSQL database. Its key/ value architecture is optimized for fast reads and writes of time series data. Riak TS provides high availability, massive scalability, and can be operationalized at lower costs than traditional relational databases while being easy to manage at scale. Riak TS is integrated with Basho Data Platform (BDP), which includes support for Apache™ Spark (in-memory analytics), Redis (caching), and Apache™ Solr (distributed search queries"

Web Apps with backend data are crucial for business

We live in a data-centric world.

Data in your store changes with time and you may have to handle data that need to scale. It follows that the applications that you build should scale. Also the developers who work for you may be more proficient in one programming language than the other. Azure Web Apps using SQL and NoSQL database backends are most suited, as scaling is built into Azure. Further Azure Web apps can be written in a number of languages that include: 

• .NET
• Java
• PHP
• Node.js
• Python

Most developers can handle two or more from the above list.

Infrastructure management is highly automated and scaling is no problem as Auto scaling capability helps you to go up or down depending on your traffic.

Web Apps with backend are really crucial for your business and your backend can be SQL Database (relational) or NoSQL (non-relational). Microsoft can handle both types, relational with SQL Azure database and NoSQL with DocumentDB (service that helps you to store, index and query JSON-based data. Review references for DocumentDB on Hodentek blog at the conclusion of this post.

You are not sure but would like to try it out for free. Here is the link (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/scenarios/web-app/) where you can get started.

Free trial may be available only for new users. I have been using Azure since it's beta and I have tried to get the free service but I have not been successful. This may be different now.

References:
Format SQL Response in JSON Format
Moving data to DocumentDB
Data store for IOT
Getting to know DocumentDB-2
Getting to know DocumentDB-1
Signing up for Azure DocumentDB
DocumentDB is announced
 

NoSQL database Amazon DynamoDB to support JSON

Looks like this database is fast and flexible; and it is NoSQL. Single digit milli-sec latency is good especially if it does not change with scale. It supports both document and Key-Value pair data models.

Amazon claims it is a good fit most of the stuff you do on the Internet (Mobile, games, web, IoT etc.).

Amazon is offering a client-side version of DynamoDB Local for free.

Access the same here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/Tools.DynamoDBLocal.html
Here is a promotional video and its support for JSON using some NASA public data

JSON will assume greater role in IoT in the coming years.

How do you sign up for Azure DocumentDB?

You need to get to the Azure preview portal here:
https://portal.azure.com/hodenteklive.onmicrosoft.com

Of course you would be needing an account on the Microsoft Azure.

You could also start here:

Once in the preview portal click on the Azure Gallery at the bottom of the page shown in this partial screenshot.

Gallery listing gets shown.

In the gallery listing shown click on Data storage, cache, +backup
Another set of related list of services gets displayed.

Click on DocumentDB.

DocumentDB is displayed with some summrized information. You can also create a DocumentDB service.

Here is the pricing information for DocumentDB presently only avilable in US West and European datacenters.

Click create to open the window for filling in details for the service you want to create. Name field has restrictions (Small ccase, numbers etc.)

Click create after filling up details.
Th program starts creating a service in the preview portal as shown.

After may be 20 minutes or so, the service was created

Read forth coming posts here and here.