Mobile Foundation Blog

Have you tried deploying the MobileFirst Platform to IBM Containers before? If yes, you would have used a bunch of command-line shell scripts which needs a list of prerequisites to set up the environment, refer the article - Run IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation on IBM Containers....more

MobileFirst Analytics – Pre-productionPart of the value of MobileFirst Platform (MFP) Foundation is the out-of-the-box, simple, integrated analytics reporting and console you deploy so you can see a near live view of your infrastructure performance, client logs, and many other events and statistics.This article does not intend to give you the talking points or espouse the benefits of analytics. I hope the value of analytics and in-production client log collection is well understood! The goal here is to give you the proper knowledge to confidently go into production with a robust, ready, and scalable analytics cluster capable of handling the......more

As you may know, the IBM Mobile Quality Assurance (MQA) team recently released the latest MQA SDKs. If you have not yet used the old or the new version, try MQA on Bluemix.The native iOS and Android SDKs remained much the same. However, the JavaScript hybrid SDK for IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation saw some major changes, and a new Apache Cordova hybrid SDK was born! For all of you eager developers wanting to learn the latest and greatest changes to this family, continue reading.Apache Cordova SDKYou can use the new Apache Cordova SDK to instrument MQA to work with pure......more

Before getting started, I would like to give the credit to my teammate Jeff Tennenbaum, who figured out how to get this working.When building hybrid mobile applications using MobileFirst Platform (MFP), part of the process is to choose a JavaScript framework to speed up the development of mobile applications (e.g., Ionic, jQuery Mobile, Dojo, etc.). In this blog, we will use Ionic for our hybrid application. One of the common things developers do is to add their custom styles. The recommended way of working with custom styles in Ionic is by using Sass, a powerful CSS language extension.Before being able......more

Our mobile backend applications are compatible with iOS 9. We tested our samples after upgrading them to the iOS 9 SDK, and they worked with Bluemix without any further updates.The following boilerplates and services support iOS 9: MobileFirst Services Starter boilerplate Push for iOS 8 (Push Notifications) service Advanced Mobile Access (Mobile Client Access) service Cloudant mobile extensions</ul>The following boilerplates and services have toleration support for iOS 9: Mobile Cloud boilerplate Push service Mobile Application Security service Mobile Data serviceFor more information about what’s new in iOS 9, check out the iOS 9 release notes.Although your app will work with......more

The recent announce of the much anticipated iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPad Pro as well as iOS 9.0 release has caused quite a bit of activity in the mobile ecosystem. Consumers are quick to adopt the newest devices and operating system, and the expectation is that their existing apps continue to work seamlessly after the upgrade. This means organizations delivering mobile apps for iOS must move quickly to test, build, and deliver their apps for the new platform and devices. Considering the heightened expectations and tight timeline, this can be a daunting task for organizations. That said, organizations......more

Working with hybrid mobile apps and MobileFirst 7.0 was a bit complex as the process was somewhat removed from what Cordova developers were used to. The good news is that MobileFirst 7.1 makes it dramatically easier to integrate hybrid mobile apps. As a hybrid mobile developer myself, this was music to my ears....more

IBM recently announced the acquisition of StrongLoop, creators of the LoopBack enterprise Node.js framework and active contributors to the Node.js community....more

There are cases where security guidelines / restrictions in the datacenter mandate that servers inside the datacenter cannot open outbound connections to the internet. The MobileFirst server needs to open outbound connections to the platform specific cloud push notification services like Apple Push Notification service (APNS), Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) or the Windows Notification service (WNS). In such cases, communicating via a proxy is a preferred option. A Proxy can be configured to contact the Push mediators and send out notifications, masking MFPF server identity....more

Note: Apps that are built with IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v6.0 to v7.1 are supported on iOS 9 GM Seed build. </p>...more

Note: Starting IBM MobileFirst Foundation 8.0 Bitcode is now supported....more

App Transport Security is one of the new features enforced by Apple to improve secure communications between App and Web Services. This feature is available from iOS 9 or later. This post talks about how to enable transport security on IBM MobileFirst Platform Servers.App Transport Security, in simple words, mandates the application to communicate with a web service over TLS version 1.2 protocol and use connection ciphers that provide forward secrecy. This means the developer has to ensure that the web service to which his application is communicating is deployed on a web server that supports TLS version 1.2 and......more

OverviewMost mobile applications need to access data stored in the enterprise's back-end system of records and other back-end systems. The traditional way for accessing those back-end systems in MobileFirst Platform (MFP) is using adapters. Adapters are pieces of code written in JavaScript that are called fom the mobile application using RPC over HTTP and that make a call to some back-end system....more

It all started when I received an email seeking help on using MQA or to be more precise integrating MQA into Xamarin based android app. Before jumping into addressing the problem, let's define MQA....more

This blog post will be continuously updated with the latest updates from testing IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation with Android Marshmallow</p>...more

Note: This procedure is no longer applicable. Use the VPN service for MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7.1 on Containers. For instructions for MobileFirst server running on Liberty buildpacks and Mobile Foundation Bluemix service (which also runs on Liberty buildpack), pl refer to this blog post ....more

Sometimes you may want to take your analytics data beyond the console....more

We just published first hands-on labs series based on MobileFirst Platform 7.1....more

IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.1 is enabled to run on IBM Bluemix using the IBM Containers....more

Let me start this post with a disclaimer that "Don't panic by reading the post title". It might look bit lengthy, but still summarises what we are trying to achieve here.Let me explain you in four steps,...more

This is a follow up to Handling binary responses in native iOS using Java adapters....more

Contributed By : Chethan Kumar SN (chethankumar.sn@in.ibm.com) and Vittal Pai (vittalpai@in.ibm.com)...more

Last week, we announced the general availability of IBM MobileFirst Platform v7.1. Today, we are announcing the availability of the Xamarin SDK for IBM MobileFirst Platform v7.1. Xamarin developers can exploit the new APIs in v7.1. You can download the SDK from the Xamarin Component Store....more

In this blog I will share a few ways of debugging or troubleshooting an MobileFirst Windows Silverlight and Windows 8.1 Universal apps (Desktops, tables and phones). I will be debugging JavaScript code, managed code (C#), native code (C/C++) and combination of these.Basically we will cover...more

IBM MobileFirst 7.1 has started the support for the Windows Universal app development paradigm. In a previous post I had explained a manual procedure of developing a C# Windows universal app using MobileFirst 7.0 DLLs. That post also explained in detail the Windows 8.1 Universal App development paradigm. Starting with MFP (MobileFirst Platform) v7.1 support was added for Windows 8.1 Universal apps as environments....more

New in IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7.1 are several Hardened security features.One of these features is Certificate Pinning....more

IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.1 introduces support for creating Cordova applications using the MobileFirst Command Line Interface (CLI).In this type of application, the MobileFirst SDK is packaged into a Cordova plug-in and is served as such along-side other core Cordova plug-ins and 3rd party Cordova plug-ins....more

In previous versions of MobileFirst Platform Foundation, the logged-in state of clients was wholly dependent on an HTTP session. After logging in, the end user remained logged in only as long as the HTTP session was alive. If either the application restarted, or the HTTP session ended, the end-user was automatically logged out....more

We are pleased to announce the Generally Availability of IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7.1!This new release is packed with many fixes and new features. Review the full list in the Release Notes....more

When developing mobile applications you may come across situations where you will need to incorporate functionality that is not readily available to implement in Hybrid applications. This can be solved by integrating 3rd party Cordova plug-ins in your application. However, there are some hurdles standing in the way to achieving this integration:...more

OverviewThis blog post is based on Saving and Retrieving Images using Cloudant with HTTP Adapters that I made a while ago using cloudant to store a base64 encoded image. Instead of saving the encoded image I will encrypt it using WL.SecurityUtils class provided in MobileFirst Foundation. WL.SecurityUtils is a small utility class that provides encryption and decryption of data using the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library (SJCL). In addition, I will not be covering the database creation or the Cordova plugin integration you can find that in the previous blog....more

As of June 5th 2015, this blog post acknowledges that IBM is aware of a recently published remote exploitation in Cordova for Android devices....more

With contributions from Rahul Raghuvanshi & Geet Manghnani....more

Since Apple recently announced they’ve achieved over $1B in sales with the Apple Watch and taken over 75% of the smartwatch market, I figured a friendly reminder that you can power the Apple Watch (and other wearable platforms) easily, securely, and efficiently with the IBM MobileFirst Platform can’t hurt… All those great features that the MobileFirst Platform brings to your mobile development process are also easily accessible to your wearable apps, including (but not limited to) data adapters, remote logging, operational analytics, push notification management, and more.</p>...more

iOS 8.4 is now public. All the flagship features such as JSONStore, authentication, notifications, app management capabilities, server connectivity and adapter invocation/chaining, Cordova plug-ins, common UI controls, native pages, native elements in hybrid pages, Analytics and logging all work as expected....more

If you're developing Hybrid applications for Windows Phone, you might have noticed that Visual Studio allows you to retarget your apps to Windows Phone 8.1. If your using the Visual Studio 2013 Profession Edition (Update 2 or higher), you have the choice on whether your can retarget your app or not. However, if you are using the Express edition of Visual Studio, you will be forced to retarget your app....more

In this blog we will do the following: Create an iOS app and use MobileFirst native API Use a MobileFirst HTTP adapter Implement tag-based push notifications to notify users when new tweets are posted Register a Twitter app and use the Twitter API to obtain a list of recent tweets Use an event source to periodically check for new tweets Create a WatchKit app that displays the list of tweets and handles notifications Pass data between the iOS and WatchKit app...more

I introduced some basic concepts around using Git with IBM MobileFirst Platform in the last post. This post will build on that through an example using IBM Bluemix DevOps Services as the host for my repository....more

This is a high level overview of managing the source code of your mobile application project in the IBM MobileFirst Platform (MFP). You should come away with enough foundational knowledge to start implementing Source Code Management (SCM) in your own project....more

Today we put the spotlight on a new section in the MobileFirst Platform Developer Center, to which we call Labs....more