Mobile Foundation Blog

If you have a Worklight Foundation or MobileFirst Platform Foundation application deployed in the Google Play Store, you may soon receive the following warning issued by Google:...more

Managing the lifecycle of mobiles apps, often referred as Mobile Application Management (MAM), is one of the key features of MobileFirst Platform Foundation. It includes:...more

Re-post from Ionic.Also see the IBM press release....more

In recent years OAuth has become a de facto industry standard for authorization. It allows client applications to securely access protected resources on behalf of the data owner without compromising data owner's credentials....more

One of the things to be aware of when working with MobileFirst platform is that you can often have installed multiple versions of tools simultaneously, with a little care. This is something as IBM consultants we frequently need to do, as we work with different customers, but might also be of value to you, our customers, as you test out upgrades and other changes to your MobileFirst applications....more

Recently (April 2015) Apple has tweaked a bit the tests performed on .ipa files as part of the App Store app submission review process.The change now disallows unsigned .sh type files inside the application bundle....more

Important:IBM Watson Question and Answer service has been disconinued. See https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2015/11/11/watson-question-and-answer-service-to-be-withdrawn/...more

OverviewCloudant is a DBaaS, Database-As-A-Service, that manages and scales fast growing data sets. Cloudant is built under Couchdb, a NoSQL database which uses dynamic schemas instead of predefined schemas seen in relational database. The user has the complete power to be create a very structured database or non structured database. In this blog post, I will create a Hybrid app that uses a Cordova Plugin to read raw data and store it into Cloudant. In addition, I will use a HTTP adapter to retrieve that content from Cloudant. The raw data will be an base64 encoded string of an image.I......more

OverviewIn the 7.0 release of MobileFirst Platform Foundation, the WLAnalytics API for native iOS has been expanded to include 2 new utility methods: generateNetworkRequestMetadataWithURL: and generateNetworkResponseMetadataWithResponseData:andTrackingId:. These methods can be used in conjunction with networking APIs to record request metadata and send it to the Analytics server. The advantage of doing so is to have analytics recorded for any network events, even to non-MobileFirst services, while still retaining full control over the implementation of the requests and responses....more

Last year, Microsoft released Update 1 for Windows Phones 8.1, also known as GDR1. While initially, this update was available only on device that were shipped new and for those with had the Preview for Developers installed, later on the update proliferated to almost all of the Lumia models. Known as the Denim update for Lumia phones, it was a major update with several changes to Internet Explorer that comes bundled with the OS....more

For the past few weeks, I've been spending a lot of time exploring hybrid mobile applications with IBM MobileFirst. I have a lot of experience with hybrid mobile applications using Cordova, but as a new IBMer, I'm still getting up to speed with MobileFirst. As part of exploration, I did some tests to see how difficult it would be to use the Ionic framework with MobileFirst. If you have not yet heard of Ionic, I strongly urge you to check it out. Ionic provides numerous services that are useful for hybrid developers. These include:...more

iOS 8.3 is out in the open and things look good for IBM MobileFirst Platform customers and developers.All the major features such as authentication, JSONStore, App management capabilities, server connectivity and adapter invocation/chaining, notifications, Cordova plug-ins, native pages, common UI controls, native elements in hybrid pages, Analytics and logging all work great.Advanced device security features like App Authenticity, Device Provisioning and others works as expected.All the features of IBM MobileFirst Platforms v6.0, v6.1, v6.2, v6.3 and v7.0 all work as expected.Watch this space as we continue to test all MFP service releases and publish the useful information related to iOS......more

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this article is a refreshed version of a previous article updated for IBM MobileFirst Platform 7.0. Indeed, the version 7.0 has introduced a new way to develop adapters using JAX-RS. Having the ability to use a Javascript or a Java based model gives the developer more flexibility to create optimized mobile services. Whilst each model has its own advantages, the particular use case described here is more elegantly implemented using the Java based approach....more

Contributed by : Srihari Kulkarni and Vivin Krishnan...more

Starting MobileFirst Platform v7.0, you can use Android ProGuard to obfuscate Android code and block reverse engineering attempts of the application.The Android ProGuard tool can be used to obfuscate, shrink, and optimize application code.ProGuard renames classes, fields, and methods with semantically obscure names, as well as removes unused code.The embedded video below demonstrates how to create a hybrid and native MobileFirst Android application with ProGuard obfuscation enabled.Main topics:...more

The below is related only to MobileFirst Platform 6.3 and below.In iOS, the application resolution is defined by the launch image provided in the application resources.MobileFirst Studio creates a default launch image when creating a hybrid application with an iOS environment but it lacks support for iPhone 6/6 Plus resolution. Starting MFP v7.0, support is provided built-in....more

Apple opened the doors to iOS 8.2 to everyone along with the much anticipated Apple Watch companion SDK.This is another milestone iOS release and things look good for IBM Mobile First Platform customers and developers.The latest available version of IBM MobileFirst Platform, v6.3, plays well with iOS 8.2, as well as with the beta releases of iOS 8.3Major features such as server connectivity and adapter invocation/chaining, authentication, notifications, Cordova plug-ins, native pages, JSONStore, App management functionality, common UI controls, native elements in hybrid pages, Analytics and logging all work great.Advanced device security features like App Authenticity and Device Provisioning are......more

IntroductionThis document describes, at a high level, the security model for the IBM MobileFirst Platform for iOS (beta). It covers the IBM Cloud-based platform whose primary documentation is available here:...more

Contributed by: Rahul RaghuvanshiBlackBerry released WebWorks SDK 2.0 beta in Q1 2014 for the BlackBerry 10.x OS. We had previoulsy published manual procedures for supporting an IBM MobileFirst hybrid applicaton with Webworks 2.0.We have now released built-in support in IBM MobileFirst Studio for generating new projects with WebWorks SDK 2.2! Based on the SDK version the WEBWORKS_HOME environment variable is pointing to, MobileFirst Studio will generate a project structure in the required structure (for WebWorks 1.x or 2.x). This support is available in the latest iFixes of:IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 6.2.0IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 6.3.0 and future releases.Please let us......more

OverviewCurrently, JSONStore does not have a dedicated feature to join collection like most relational databases. However, you can utilize shared indexes using additional search fields to relate different collections. In this blog, I will demonstrate how this is done and at the end of the blog I will attach an app that you can use to help you. In addition, I would recommend using the latest publicly available version of MobileFirst Platform but this may apply to older versions as well....more

A detailed walk thru of developing a Android and iOS Xamarin.forms app for IBM MobileFirst ...more

OverviewMobileFirst Platform Foundation Server allows to protect adapter procedures via several types of authentication, using security tests, realms and login modules.The MobileFirst client-side SDK helps you handle challenges sent by the server when trying to access a protected resource....more

IntroductionAn often requested feature by customers for MobileFirst Platform (previously Worklight) is having the ability to change, during runtime, the MobileFirst Server URL an application will attempt connecting to....more

If you are deploying a MobileFirst Platform Foundation (aka Worklight) application and you are wondering how you will deploy the server in several data centers for better performances and high availability, you may consider this new article on developerWorks "How to coordinate and execute an active-active topology with IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation"....more

BlackBerry released their latest BB10 release recently. At the time of writing the post, the 10.3 release is available for BlackBerry Passport, BlackBerry Classic, Porsche Design P’9983 smartphone from BlackBerry.We have verified the BB 10.3.1 release withIBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 6.2.0IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 6.3.0In our certification we haven't found any issues to report, so all is well! Do let us know if you see any issue through in the discussion forum....more

In Android 5.0 (Lollipop), Google announced bridged notifications for wearables. Notifications and their actions (i.e what happens when you tap on a notification) are bridged over to the wearable devices by default. However all the actions cannot be achieved with a single tap on the watch. So mobile developers need a way to hide some of the notifications from appearing on the watch, and conversely allow some notifications to bridge over to the watch. IBM MobileFirst v6.3.0 added support for bridging control of notifications....more