I recently put together some content on building “Apps that Work as Well Offline as they do Online” using IBM MobileFirst and Bluemix (cloud services). There was the original blog post, I used the content in a presentation at ApacheCon, and now I’ve opened everything up for anyone use or learn from.
The content now lives on the IBM Bluemix github account, and includes code for the native iOS app, code for the web (Node.js) endpoint, a comprehensive script that walks through every step of of the process configuring the application, and also a video walkthrough of the entire process from backend creation to a complete solution.
Key concepts demonstrated in these materials:
- User authentication using the Bluemix Advanced Mobile Access service
- Remote app logging and instrumentation using the Bluemix Advanced Mobile Access service
- Using a local data store for offline data access
- Data replication (synchronization) to a remote data store
- Building a web based endpoint on the Node.js infrastructure
You can download or fork any of the code at:
The repo contains:
- Complete step-by-step instructions to guide through the entire app configuration and deployment process
- Client-side Objective-C code (you can do this in either hybrid or other native platforms too, but I just wrote it for iOS). The “iOS-native” folder contains the source code for a complete sample application leveraging this workflow. The “GeoPix-complete” folder contains a completed project (still needs you to walk through backend configuration). The “GeoPix-starter” folder contains a starter application, with all MobileFirst/Bluemix code commented out. You can follow the steps inside of the “Step By Step Instructions.pdf” file to setup the backend infrastructure on Bluemix, and setup all code within the “GeoPix-starter” project.
- Backend Node.js app for serving up the web experience.