Chapter 6. Mobile Apps on PaaS
The growth of mobile apps has pushed forward the model of creating services that are consumed through APIs to such a degree that APIs are now at the forefront of development. It has become a necessity, not a nice-to-have, to be able to create APIs and serve them at large scales.
Before we look at code examples for creating mobile apps on PaaS, let’s put these new techniques in perspective by briefly examining their evolution.
A Brief History of Mobile App Development
Before the iPhone first hit the marketplace in 2007, mobile phones had an incredibly tightly controlled environment. It was difficult and often impossible to create third-party mobile applications, and there were strict limitations on what those applications could do. Even the mobile web had its own proprietary formats on early phones. They had their own versions of HTML, like TTML (Tagged Text Markup Language), WML (Wireless Markup Language), and HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language), that were stripped down to the bare minimum and included odd new, arbitrary tags so that they would work on these highly constrained devices.
The iPhone was the first cell phone to ever ship with a fully compatible HTML web browser.
On the original iPhone, third-party apps were originally built as HTML websites optimized for the phone’s screen. Obviously, these were not yet native mobile applications; they were still browser based.
One of the early innovations in mobile application development was writing applications ...
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