Mobile Foundation Blog

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IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation (rel. 7.1 – hereafter referred to as MFPF), is now available on Bluemix. The main components of the platform – the server and the analytics can be run as containers on the IBM Bluemix Container Service. This blog discusses a step-by-step approach for building and deploying the server and analytics containers using the IBM Bluemix DevOps Services....more

I’ve blogged before about the client-side API for hybrid mobile apps built on IBM MobileFirst. One of the things I’ve discovered recently is the library of DefinitlyTyped definition files for TypeScript developers. These files provide intellisense for a huge set of various frameworks and client-side code written in TypeScript. Turns out though that you can also use them in regular old JavaScript files too. My editor of choice (Visual Studio Code) has [great support](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/javascript for this. You can simply get the file, drop it into your project, and go to town....more

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This month IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation released two new features in an iFix for Operational Analytics, accessibility, and application crash analytics....more

##OverviewThe purpose of this page is to describe how to run performance tests on the different features of the MFP Server. In this post, an Apache JMeter performance test is used and Java classes are compiled especially for JMeter....more

As of November 25, 2015, this blog post acknowledges that IBM is aware that Cordova announced two CVEs for vulnerabilities on the Android platform. This post will focus on CVE-2015-5257. The other CVE is still being worked on....more

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Isn’t it frustrating that even with a big screen Android phone, you cannot read a Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) push notification send from MobileFirst server , in its entirety in the notification shade. Changing the orientation to landscape does not help as this has no effect on the notification shade in your Android phone. You quickly want to copy a coupon code or OTP (One time password) but cannot, since you do not see the complete text....more

We at IBM MobileFirst Platform team spend a lot of time creating new stuff. in our daily race to make sure we are up to speed with what our users need, it seems like a good idea to ask them directly about their use of the product. We actually didn’t come up with this approach by ourselves- this is becoming a common practice in our industry....more

I’ve always been sort of fascinated by the speed and convenience of mail delivery services in the United States. In anticipation of the rapidly-arriving Halloween holiday, I purchased a Harley Quinn costume from Amazon. In a mere two days, my costume of epic proportions was packaged, left the carrier facility, traveled several hundred miles, and delivered to my doorstep. Meanwhile, all I had to do was click a few buttons and walk to my door....more

One of the nice things about new features is that they can provide you with the solution to the one or two things that prevented something from completely meeting your needs. For example, do you remember what convinced you to purchase your new phone or car?Mobile Quality Assurance (MQA) for Bluemix updated its code to include the ability to connect with additional issue-tracking systems, as well as sentiment analysis support for India. Bug-tracking system supportMQA had issue-tracking integration with IBM Rational Team Concert for quite a while, but you had some roadblocks to overcome if you did not use Rational......more

October 8th - the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation (aka Worklight) Xamarin SDK turned 1! Agreed – this blog post is a couple of weeks overdue :). We unveiled the component at Evolve last year and have been releasing updates to keep pace with the IBM MFP releases. Initially the updates were a bit slow to keep pace as we were getting the skids greased, but now we are at a 1st day support cycle since our 7.1 release. And we refreshed it 7 times in between as well. 9 updates in the last 12 months – not too shabby! This......more

Disclaimer: The solution discussed herein is from my own personal experience as a developer using the MobileFirst platform and do not represent IBM's view nor IBM's interest in supporting this officially....more

Greetings!...more

Alerting in MFP Analytics now allows users to set alerts around their analytics data that will notify them when a threshold has been reached. Currently, these notifications are sent through the analytics console or a configurable webhook....more

Have you experienced the "add dynamic content Errors" in MFP Windows Universal apps?...more

My brother and I never got along when we were kids. I suppose that happens with most siblings. I would want to watch a movie, while he preferred to read comic books. We quite simply didn’t mesh that well together.Similarly, IBM Mobile Quality Assurance (MQA) and Apache Cordova are great products by themselves, but they could never interact with each other. Until now. In this tutorial, I will show you just how easy it is to make them work together (much easier than for a parent of siblings)....more

Do you need to capture raw debug logs from devices in production from the field? Do you want to capture analytics events from applications deployed in production?...more

Exploring and Coding are part of every developer's life. While exploring you may come across many technologies, tools, libraries etc. Each technology has its own recommended IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for developing applications. Like...more

Since you've read the MobileFirst Analytics - Planning for Production blog post, you're ready to get some practice setting up a cluster....more

As of October 6, 2015, this blog post acknowledges that IBM is aware of the recent vulnerability in the Apache Cordova Android File-Transfer Plugin and has responded accordingly....more

When IBM Bluemix started, the opportunity for mobile developers was an obvious one. It takes only a quick look at your phone to see that almost every app uses a core set of capabilities - Authentication, Push Notifications, Data and Analytics. Consider how many apps there are, and that they are all using this functionality. Should every developer be standing up a server and rewriting this rudimentary software? No, they should be using a service or services. Heck, they probably shouldn’t be writing any server side code at all, right? So true to lean, we stood up a set of......more

Greetings!We just published new hybrid hands-on lab series for MobileFirst Platform 7.1...more

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