Version 7 of IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation introduces many new features and enhancements to “enable enterprises to accelerate the delivery of their mobile strategy” by making development more efficient, supporting continuous delivery, and improving user experience, says IBM.
Compared to the previous version of the product, IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7 adds support for:
- scalable data storage: this is based on a local Cloudant data layer, IBM’s JSON document store that allows to manage both structured or unstructured data. MobileFirst Cloudant extensions “extend Cloudant Local APIs with support for native language objects for iOS and Android developers, offline access, and online remote access.”
- support for standard back-end protocols such as REST and oAuth: this encompasses application authentication, user authentication through oAuth, Java and JavaScript adapters that expose a full REST API, service discovery through REST, and more.
- improved analytics: this is mostly related to possibility of creating reports and charts from within MobileFirst’s analytics console.
- improved APIs: this includes updated client-side APIs for the major platforms, such as iOS, Android, C#/.Net, and JavaScript.
- new tutorials and samples.
MobileFirst Platform Foundation (formerly known as Worklight Foundation) is one of three products that IBM offers under the brand MobileFirst, together with MobileFirst Application Scanning, and MobileFirst Quality Assurance.
MobileFirst Platform Foundation is made up of several components:
- MobileFirst Server: a gateway between back-end systems and services and the mobile client applications.
- MobileFirst APIs: both client-side and server-side APIs are available.
- MobileFirst Studio: an optional development environment based on Eclipse.
- MobileFirst Console: a command-line dashboard.
- MbileFirst Application Center: a tool to distribute apps inside of an organization.
IBM MobileFirst Platform is, among other things, at the center of the Apple-IBM agreement that brought IBM to introduce several apps for iOS that are specifically targeted to the enterprise market.