Take a look at how an iPaaS solution can be effectively used in mobile development. Involves features such as low-code and AI/ML-assisted development.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Thinking of building the next big mobile application? The time to market of a mobile application is critical in the current fast-paced industry. Deciding if it’s an Android or an iOS application is just one part of the problem. Most of today’s applications need a backend system to carry out their operations. Features like remote data storage/syncing, authentication, and user communication require a set of backend services to be available. So, how can we develop these backend systems for mobile applications? There are two main patterns for doing this. The first is to do direct integration. In this approach, the mobile application directly communicates to a web server, which hosts a set of web services that serve the required requests. This is good enough for simple applications, where all the business logic is independent of other external services, and the functionality is self-contained. But what if we have many other external services that are required for functions in the mobile app? This is where we use the mediated pattern for mobile development. A mediation layer can effectively perform typical operations that are required when integrating with multiple services, such as data mapping, routing, and transformation. In today’s cloud computing shift, almost all mainstream functions are available as software as a service (SaaS) products. There are services from messaging, databases, to identity management that are provided as cloud services. If most of the services integrated are available in the cloud, the next logical step would be to provide the mediation layer functionality in the cloud as well. This is where an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) comes into play. An iPaaS can effectively integrate cloud and on-premises services with hybrid cloud features, in order to provide front-end mobile applications clean API interfaces to work with. Let’s take a deeper look at the typical requirements of a modern iPaaS in relation to mobile application development. In mobile development, the most often used approach for communication is JSON over HTTP. So, it’s essential that an iPaaS has rich support for JSON data handling, validation, and transformation capabilities. Also, HTTP/2 support is a plus when providing full-duplex persistent connections, which allows us to do much more efficient concurrent request handling, which results in lower latency for applications. Alongside HTTP APIs, support for API definitions is critical with technology such as OpenAPI. This way, an API can be properly described for applications to use. WebSocket is a communication protocol that allows us to have full-duplex communication using a TCP connection. This is used mainly in a web application context, where an established HTTP connection is used to upgrade itself to a WebSocket connection. Afterward, the client and the server can perform bi-directional communication without the overhead of the HTTP protocol. Practically, in the context of mobile application development, if the mobile application is based on a web browser technology, WebSocket will be essential in having efficient communication with the server.
