I learned how to code in swift a little while back and created my first app. Now I'm trying to market it to customers, I realized that a web-interface might be what I need to scale this up to start attracting clients.
I use firebase as my backend now and would like to see what I can do to have a web interface that:
Allows customers to log in to see their unique data.
Updates info on my firebase backend
is Scaleable.
I'm not sure where to start nor how long this process will take. Any one has any ideas on where to get started?
I'm pretty sure Wordpress has a firebase plugin that could come in handy. Using Wordpress would save a lot of time actually designing a website, getting servers, and backend stuff like that. If you pay a little bit you can get rid of the .wordpress. com tag too, and your website can easily look professional.
Firebase is a realtime database and it is mostly used with mobile apps and some of the JavaScript applications like Angular and ReactJS. I think the best is to use ReactJS and there you can do a lot of the same functionalities you did on your app.
You can find a lot of tutorials online about how to do reactjs and firebase apps.
Have a look at this post and it should give you an idea about how it is done. It is gonna be a new thing if you are not familiar with javascript NodeJS / ReactJS development. (Firebase, react and redux wait for store to update)
Related
There are a ton of online CMS services out there. And a ton of (new) backend-as-a-service products too. But I can't seem to find what I am looking for.
I am building an app for a client. The app contains data about shops, products, and more. The client must be able to update this data (and not just one person: each shop manager needs to be able to log in and edit the data for their own shop). And of course the app must be able to access this data.
Client edits data online
This has to be extremely user-friendly and completely online. I don't want to sell my client something where they need to install stuff on their server. I don't want to sell them something that's accessible online but looks like phpMyAdmin.
I want a shop owner to be able to go to a webpage, log in, and then see a pretty UI where they can edit the data for their shop. The back-end needs to have a pretty front-end that's auto-generated for whatever data this particular shop owner is allowed to edit.
So there are two bits: storing data in the cloud in such a way that it can be accessed by the app (which I am building with Titanium), and allowing the client to log into the backend and edit the data in a non-tech, user-friendly way.
Here's a list of things I tried...
Backend-as-a-service
Services with a great back-end, but without easy auto-generated data editing website:
Appcelerator (Titanium) Cloud Service
Amazon EC2
Stackmob
BackBeam
WebVanta
Parse
API o Mat
ShepHertz Cloud42
Kii
Online CMS
Services that provide a nice way for clients to edit data, but no easy way for apps to connect:
CloudCMS
(and many others I'm sure)
It's insane that no-one seems to be providing the cross-breed of BaaS and online CMS. So many people are building apps for clients, and so many clients are not tech-savvy and are reluctant to get a special server and host database software they don't understand. Why does this not exist? What am I missing?
With apiOmat it's easy to create your own data-editing app for e.g. with JavaScript SDK and HTML. Or you send a feature request so that they build a module for your preferred CMS.
As you mentioned, Cloud CMS is a really good option (disclaimer: I'm one of the founders). The product provides an enterprise content management backend and an API that lets you plug in some really powerful features right into your mobile apps.
This month, we released a brand new user interface which provides much of what you're asking about. Instant forms, document libraries, search and workflow all in one place.
You can check out Cloud CMS here: http://www.cloudcms.com
I completely agree with your assessment particularly with respect to the last mile (getting the final app built). It's kind of the wild west out there and the strong technologies are still proving out.
You mentioned Titanium - that's a good choice. I also quite like the Ionic Framework (http://www.drifty.com/). It's a step in the right direction.
Case:
I have an existing page based on Drupal and going to develop a phoneGap iOS App. That means I just need the information of the existing page and want to fill these data in the new app.
My Question is now, do somebody know weather there is a work around or work flow to do so resp. how can I connect the existing page with another page or in my case phoneGap to get just the data? I'm new with Drupal and phoneGap so maybe you have some pages with information, tutorials or some help how to do this.
Thanks in advance yves
Drupal offers a module called "Services" which will allow you to get data or services from your website. You may need to create your own methods on that module to get the information you want to retrieve.
As for the iOS side, you can retrieve the data via XML-RPC, Rest or whatever communication protocol you choose at the server side, or go all the way with drupal-ios.
https://github.com/workhabitinc/drupal-ios-sdk/
You should start looking for the Services module and play with it. You will have an embedded console on that module to test the methods.
Once you're finish with that, take a look at drupal-ios or go deep with your own implementation via XML-RPC or whatever.
I am writing an iphone app and I need to scrape about 50+ websites for data.
Does anyone know of any good client-side solutions that I can use ? I dont want to build a backend just for this.
Any pointers ?
Thanks
Rohan
Looks like your primary focus is the mobile application, and you want to offload the scraping activity to an outside service.
Use a service such as Bobik ( http://usebobik.com ) that provides APIs for scraping data off websites. You can even test your queries for free!
The API is fairly extensive, have a look at http://usebobik.com/api/docs for more information. There's even a SDK available!
I think it is natural to build a small backend web app that takes a query from your phone and does the scraping. It's extremely easy, is not it? Scraping can be done via curl or something.
A web server these days is about 15 lines of code from the scratch.
I am looking to build software that has an Iphone application as well as a Wordpress based website. Essentially the user will enter data into the iphone app that will then be relayed to the Wordpress site and displayed in various manners.
Whats the best way to get the iphone database and CMS database to communicate?
Thanks
This might go without saying, but generally speaking I would try to keep your client (iPhone) app as 'dumb' as possible; Your Wordpress DB should really own all of the content, and the data stored on the iPhone should be as temporal as possible. To put it another way, your app should be like a WP theme. A theme doesn't really 'know' about the WP database - it's just responsible for displaying it (and occasionally adding to it with things like comment forms).
Anyway, as for the actual communication I would recommend keeping as much in JSON as possible (I've found it easier than XML). There's a great plug-in for Wordpress that can help you out, that exposes WP functionality in a JSON-based API: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
As for working with JSON on the phone itself, I highly recommend the json-framework: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ . In short, it'll convert a JSON string into an NSDictionary in one method. Incredibly useful.
Good luck!
May be it's too obvious, but usually for database communicaton used XML, CSV, JSON etc.
I would like my iPhone app to get dynamic content off the net. This content should be managed using a CMS. I would like to know in particular if I can setup Drupal or Joomla or other CMS as a backend for my iphone app to get the content.
Any advice on how this can be achieved would be helpful.
I am completely new to setting up/using CMS.
You can also take a look at StorageRoom, which is a CMS for Mobile Applications.
Disclaimer: I created this myself to scratch my own itch.
Wordpress with the JSON-API plugin is a great solution, especially if you need a web site as well.
You can find a good example here that uses Wordpress and Phonegap to get a basic app going.
If you can access the content in any serialized format (e.g. XML or JSON), it should be no problem to use any CMS as a "backend" for your application.
I'm checking out storageroom, and I'm searching for a similar answer, but I also found osmek to be a bit promising. I might use that one because of the menu templates .Osmek can provide responses in json and xml (and other formats that aren't useful in iphone dev like php, html, and templates)
Feed.Us is another option. I have a series of travel guides iphone apps and use Feed.Us to manage the businesses listed within the apps.
It creates a URL with XML that gets imported into the app.
This seems to be a very promising solution!
Apache Usergrid
I have briefly tried DreamFactory for some trial project but never got around to using it in production. Usergrid seems to be in the right direction in providing a full fledged solution (which can also work for modern web apps)
I'm very curious about Helios (helios.io) and will be trying it out shortly.
At least from the write-up on their site it looks very promising. Its open source, and in beta currently. They also have very easy heroku hosting support.
Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential backend
services for iOS apps, from data synchronization and push
notifications to in-app purchases and passbook integration.
I will update the answer again once I use this for some test project.
you can use any cms or framework to implement this. you need to make a jsonm api to communicate between app and backend server.
For php cms joomla, drupal and wordpress are best.
in frameworks you can use yii, cakephp, laravel or zend
hope this helps..
Also worth taking a look at Cloud CMS:
http://www.cloudcms.com
It's a cloud content management system for mobile and web applications, entirely oriented around JSON and having a fast, fully featured API. Your iOS application could easily grab things, render them, capture data, store it back into the CMS and more. Plus, it gives you a user interface you can drop in front of your business users so that they can create, edit and review things.
Note: I'm one of the developers. That said, worth checking out if for no other reason than for inspiration.
Depending on the data-complexity, perhaps willing a CMS into being a data-store or simple API is overkill when you can leverage file storage services like Google Drive/Apps to GET/POST spreadsheets or other documents in JSON, among other formats.
Is it possible to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, etc. as a server space?