In the previous chapter we learnt about the architecture pattern for application development on cloud, called Microservices architecture pattern. We also learnt how to use Bluemix and services on Bluemix to build and deploy applications that employ the microservices architecture.
In this chapter, we will learn to develop a simple mobile client application using Bluemix, and we will also learn the use of Bluemix services with the mobile applications. You will also see how easy it is to get started with your mobile application development using the template applications provided out of the box in the mobile dashboard on Bluemix.
In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:
- Learn about the mobile category services available on Bluemix
- Create a mobile application using the mobile dashboard on Bluemix
- Integrate the Push Notifications service to your mobile application
- Send push notifications to your mobile application and see it all working together
Services under the Mobile category, as seen in the Bluemix catalog, are as follows:
- Mobile Analytics: This is an IBM service
- Mobile Application Content Manager: This is an IBM service
- Mobile Client Access: This is an IBM service
- Mobile Foundation: This is an IBM service
- Push Notifications: This is an IBM service
- Mobile Quality Assurance: This is an IBM service
- TestdroidCloud: This is a third-party service
- Twilio: This is a third-party service
- Kinetise: This is a third-party service
When you log in to Bluemix and select the Mobile category, you will be taken to what is known as the Mobile Dashboard:
From here you can create a new mobile project, or you can add a mobile service instance by clicking the Get started now! icon in the top-right corner, as shown in the following screenshot:
Clicking the Get started now! icon will display the mobile services available on Bluemix. At the time of writing this book, the available mobile services are as shown in the following screenshot:
An in-depth description of these services is outside the scope of this book.
Note
To learn more about each of these mobile services, refer to https://ibm.biz/Bdrbmc .
Let us look at how to create a simple mobile application and how we can configure the application to use some of the services provided by Bluemix.