Issue link: https://axway.uberflip.com/i/991643
© 2016 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED APIS & MBAAS: HOW TO EXTEND YOUR ARCHITECTURE FOR A MOBILE WORLD 4 desktop-bound activity. Users now expect full data access from the grocery line, the airport terminal, the in-laws Thanksgiving table, and so on. This changes usage profiles dramatically, in both transaction volume and time of access. The second point goes to the new primacy of the user. Mobile has put a premium on effective, responsive app experiences. Too much wait time and the user simply deletes the app in favor of a better one. Given these new mobile realities, an architecture designed for elastic scale is critical. 2. PREBUILT, MOBILE-OPTIMIZED APIS Mobile's emphasis on user experience makes good client design and development paramount, which means developers want maximum simplicity for the server-side "plumbing" required to access data and pipe it in the right format to the app. This is where application programming interfaces—APIs—come in. APIs are the lifeblood of mobility. They give developers the simplified access to the data and services needed to build amazing apps. In fact, good mobile APIs act as a spur to innovation. Think of them as Lego blocks: the better and more varied the collection of blocks you make available, the better and more creative the objects people build. An enterprise that makes mobile-optimized APIs widely available to developers is positioned to make terrific innovation leaps, and at a pace that would never be achievable by top-down planning alone. What are examples of the kinds of APIs the new mobile tier might offer? For starters, there are the commonly required capabilities of most mobile apps, such as the ability to manage push notifications and geo-location services, or readily access a NoSQL database for on-demand storage of app data, or seamlessly integrate with social media services. Beyond these core building blocks, the tier would also deliver access to traditional corporate data stores such as Salesforce, mySQL, MS SQL and the like. This access, or mobile "connectors," would provide the ability first to authenticate with these stores, and then perform basic functions with their data: create, retrieve, update and delete.