Introduction
Developers today have no trouble finding tools to build interactive, user-friendly mobile applications. What really makes them tear their hair out, though, is connecting those applications to data. That’s because the data needed by a mobile application might be stored in a legacy enterprise relational database management system (RDBMS), in a distributed online data store, in one or more Web APIs — the list goes on. More often than not, the data will be located in all of the above.
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- What You Will Need
- Step 1: Define the DreamFactory Application
- Step 2: Understand the WordPress Rest API
- Step 3: Add the WordPress Service to DreamFactory
- Step 4: Enable the Application User Interface
- Step 5: Simplify Service Access with Swagger
- Step 6: Understand the Mailgun API
- Step 7: Add the Mailgun Service to DreamFactory
- Step 8: Add Authentication and Authorization
- Conclusion
Since different data sources typically have different Authentication and access patterns (REST for Web APIs, PL/SQL for Oracle, and so on), developers must often spend time figuring out how to connect to, read from, and write to each data source from their mobile application. And that’s where a backend Platform like DreamFactory can help.
DreamFactory is an open source mobile backend that aims to make it easier to hook up a mobile application to external databases, file storage systems, and external Web services. In this article, I'll show you how to build a mobile blogging application that uses two different Web services to publish and promote new blog posts on the move. Using DreamFactory, I will also eliminate the need for API coding or maintenance. One benefit of this approach is that developers can be more productive, focusing on Front-end app development without concerning themselves with Back-end code.
