There are now a number of backend-as-a-service companies focused on mobile developers. We list 6 backend APIs that help with common mobile tasks, including the Cocoafish API, which was today acquired by Appcelerator. But it’s a much bigger ecosystem, as shown in the infographic below.
Amazon just dropped prices on its popular Amazon S3 API, which provides storage to much of the web. The service will pass 1 trillion objects stored this year. With that volume comes opportunities to lower the costs, as we’ve seen from other companies whose entire product line includes APIs.
Google App Engine has had a tough year last year. It had to deal with developer revolt when it announced it’s pricing and has also seen its mindshare in the PaaS landscape reduce with the emergence of polyglot platforms like CloudFoundry and Heroku. One thing they have got consistently going for them and which is continuing this year is their razor sharp focus on releases. Google App Engine has been averaging a release every month of late and January saw them release the latest version 1.6.2.
So you need to send emails. Pretty simple right? Not so fast. It doesn’t matter how easy your language or framework makes sending emails, if you try to do it on your own be prepared to configure mail servers, setup Spam-related DNS entries, and still wonder if mail is actually being delivered. And your applications needs to process incoming email? Back to the config files, piping mail to your script – or just end up polling a POP or IMAP box. That’s what I had to do, back in the day. Fortunately, like so many things today, there’s an API for that. Actually there are a few.
There’s a difference between knowing and hoping your API can handle any traffic you send to it. The premise behind the new performance testing service Cloud Assault is that testing scale should be part of development. The service has the Cloud Assault API to enable coders to do just that.
Librato hits the sweet spot for late adopters. Developers that are not willing to host their systems in the cloud, but need to implement reliable, automatic scaling should find Librato to be a realistic way forward. It allows for existing applications to be wrapped in “containers” and “templates” which transform them into monitored processes that produce performance metrics. Now with the Librato APIs, developers can now fully manage their process configuration set programatically. This company makes a serious offering to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space with technology driven on an excellent strategy and backed by 12 million in funding.
At first glance you may think CloudMine is trying to put me out of buisness. As a contract developer, I find myself frequently working with APIs, and occasionally building them. The APIs I’ve built don’t make their way into ProgrammableWeb’s directory, for the most part they’re private APIs used by mobile devices to store user data and access dynamic content. Now the CloudMine API wants to provide that as a service for any mobile application.
In this post I’ll describe how we planned, built and tested a truly real-time location-based game with Socket.io, Redis, Node.js, and what we learned along the way. Over the past few months, we’ve spent the majority our free time building a real-time game as a test for our location platform, Geoloqi. We call the game MapAttack! due to its map-based nature. Two teams compete to capture the most points on the gameboard. The gameboard, in this case, is the city streets of the neighborhood the players are in.
When video rental and streaming company Netflix released its Netflix API, it was meant to support its DVD-by-mail business. In the time since the Netflix API was released, the business has shifted to streaming instant video, from hundreds of devices. Meanwhile, the Netflix API hasn’t changed much and it’s time for a redesign, according to Netflix’s Daniel Jacobson in his talk at OSCon Wednesday. Jacobson’s talk offers examples of how the next iteration might look, including doing away with versions, but creating unique endpoints for each partner’s application.
The Netflix API launched in 2008 with the same hope as many API providers: to attract developers who would build amazing applications on top of the service. Fast-forward 3 years: with more than 23 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, Netflix is the world’s leading Internet subscription service and the way in which millions of people are watching movies and TV shows — not just via DVDs shipped to their home, but increasingly online.
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