Yearly Archives

109 Articles

GraphQL BaaS – Backend as a Service

GraphQL BaaS – Backend as a Service
graphql-baas

Creating the next big mobile app is an expensive and time-consuming process. Taking your idea to life demands time, energy, and financial resources. I will explore how new technologies like GraphQL will reduce your time to market and speed up your app development process.

This article will explain the benefits of using GraphQL together with Backend as a Service platform, and here is a summary of what you will learn:


An Instagram clone using SwiftUI and GraphQL

An Instagram clone using SwiftUI and GraphQL

Today we are starting a series of blog posts that will teach you how to use a lot of cool tools to build your own Social Network: an application that resembles Instagram.

We won’t save up on tech and will be using the latest and greatest: Parse, GraphQL, some NodeJS and especially the (yet to be released) latest Apple’s framework SwiftUI. 

This will take a few posts in order to be fully functional, but when we get there, you will realize how simple it can be to get your ideas up and running with very little effort here at Back4app.

For better learning, download the iOS Instagram Clone project with source code.

So, it seems it is time for…

 


GraphQL iOS: Using Cloud Functions in a Swift App

GraphQL iOS: Using Cloud Functions in a Swift App

On this article, I showed you how to use GraphQL with NodeJS Cloud Code in Back4app.

And on this guide, I showed you how to use Apollo GraphQL iOS Client with Swift.

Now let’s bring it all together and make lots of complicated operations by producing really easy code. And let’s also have XCode to automatically generate any API code for us even when we change Classes.

Sounds good? So get some coffee and get along!


Parse Self Hosted vs Back4App

Parse Self Hosted vs Back4App

Parse versus Back4App

Did you know that Parse and Back4app are two very different platforms? Often beginners confuse the two, which leads them to choose the wrong platform. We’re frequently asked by our users, what are the differences between Parse vs. Back4App. To help answer that, we have created the most comprehensive comparison of Back4App vs. Parse (self-hosted version).


GraphQL and NodeJS integrations using Cloud Code Functions

GraphQL and NodeJS integrations using Cloud Code Functions

GraphQL brings sugar, spice, and everything nice to API developers, but it is basically a query language so you can specify what you are looking for.

What if you need more business intelligence than that in your application?

What if you need some logic along with it?

What if you want that neat NPM Module module along with it?

Well, fasten your seat belts because today I’ll show you something very powerful. And with great powers, comes great… well… great time savings, great possibilities, great lots of good stuff…

 


What is GraphQL? Your app 10x faster

What is GraphQL? Your app 10x faster

GraphQL is a query language for APIs developed by Facebook in 2012. In simple words, it’s used to load data from a server to a client (i.e. from an API to your application) much more efficiently than traditional services.

It’s fair to say that GraphQL is unlike anything you might have used before which is precisely why a large number of organizations have switched over to it for building APIs.

In this article, I’ll take a closer look at some of the major problems behind current REST APIs and how GraphQL solves them while improving productivity. I’ll also explain some of the key benefits developers can experience by using GraphQL and whether you should make the switch from REST to GraphQL.

Let’s get started.


GraphQL: is it the REST API “killer”?

GraphQL: is it the REST API “killer”?

After the implementation of the GraphQL support in Parse a lot of people reached me with a few questions, some of them worried about the future of REST API.
Is GraphQL going to “kill” it?
What will happen with my REST API methods? Do I need to rewrite my code?

In this article I will cover those questions, but short answer is: no, you don’t have to worry because GraphQL is not going to “kill” REST API and you also don’t have to worry about rewriting your already working REST API methods.


Hasura Alternatives – Top Competitors

Hasura Alternatives – Top Competitors
hasura-alternatives

Hasura proceeds to innovate and dominate the real-time GraphQL market. While it extends a frequently refined collection of products for many varieties of development requirements, it may be not always the easiest, most agile, or cheapest option. There’s a frequently increasing inventory of cloud companies that extend products and services in ways that can avail developers with easiness and affordability.

In this blog post, I’ll show some of the alternatives to Hasura; some companies that are still young but still useful to developers.  Others are more stable businesses and running for a while.  The tutorial will include subsequent competitors:

  • Back4App – GraphQL database hosting platform
  • Parse – Open-Source GraphQL framework
  • GraphCool – Open-Source framework to deploy serverless GraphQL backends
  • AWS App Sync – Service to run GraphQL in the cloud
  • Postgraphile – GraphQL APIs from a Postgres schema
  • Subzero – GraphQL & REST APIs for databases


Mastering Web API authentication with Parse – Javascript SDK and GraphQL flavours

Many applications, especially websites, need to restrict access to their content, and having user accounts that show only information relevant to that user in a secure way is the most popular way to accomplish that.

Today we will learn how to implement the Login functionality to an already existing HTML page, writing very little code and having Parse doing all the heavy lifting for you, and in order to do that, I chose the Login Form template which you can download for free.

We will be using two distinct technologies that you can choose from: the Javascript SDK and GraphQL through Javascript.

GraphQL is our brand new shiny technology that was just released and my goal is to compare both ways to do the same thing, so you can pick the one you like best.
SPOILER ALERT!! I am sure you will like GraphQL better…

That already has all the necessary files for visually display the file but lacks functionality, which we will be adding.

 


Setting up coding standards tools for Javascript projects

Setting up coding standards tools for Javascript projects

Have you ever wasted a lot of time merging endless files just because someone committed a file with a different code style and refused to fix it?

Have you ever had problems with your code editor because it was formatting your code on save leaving it with some weird line breaks, or using tabs instead of spaces?

Have you ever pushed a commit to fix a typo, trying to reference _MyVar instead of _myVar?

If your answer is Yes to any of the questions above, or you just don’t want to find yourself in any of these situations, stick with me.


open
Build, deploy and scale your app with Back4App Containers

open
Build, deploy and scale your app with Back4App Containers. Start today!