© 2016 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
APIS & MBAAS: HOW TO EXTEND YOUR ARCHITECTURE FOR A MOBILE WORLD
2
How Mobile
Broke the
Three-tier World
In the days of web applications, we concerned ourselves primarily
with connecting to systems inside the enterprise. This meant a
relatively small number of backend sources, all behind the firewall.
The original middleware solutions were designed for just this world,
orchestrating data from a handful of enterprise systems, and
rendering it to a powerful, plugged-in, big screen client device—the
personal computer.
Mobile's first challenge to the old web world is the expansion and
diversification of data sources. Any mobile app worth its salt must
orchestrate data not only from private enterprise systems, but also
public clouds (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), corporate SaaS systems (e.g.
Salesforce) and increasingly even smart appliances and the like drawn
from the Internet of Things.
But the challenge doesn't stop there. The regular, anywhere/anytime
access habit of mobile users increases transaction volumes through
apps, meaning that architectures must scale elastically. Furthermore,
because mobile devices can't count on an uninterrupted connection,
the apps must continue to function when offline and gracefully
synchronize to the backend when the connection is restored. As the
following table shows, virtually every aspect of mobile app connectivity
differs from the web.
