MBaaS Needs a Push in the Cloud

As part of an effort to get both closer to customers and make employees more productive enterprise IT organizations have been racing to build mobile computing applications. The problem many of them and their solution provider partners have is that they wind up reinventing the same backend services wheels over and over again. For that reason, a raft of mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) that run on a variety of clouds has emerged. But even once those services are invoked, data still needs to be pumped out to those mobile applications.

To make that process more efficient, FatFractal, a provider of MBaaS software, has formed an alliance with Push Technology, a provider of a publish and subscribe server based on HTTP, called Diffusion, that is used to push content out to any number of types of endpoints.

Push Technology CEO Sean Bowen said the goal is to leverage REST application programming interfaces (APIs) in a way that enables organizations to deliver data and content at truly Web scale. In the case of FatFractal, that means making use of Diffusion to add a Live Queries feature to a FatFractal NoServer software that is based on a metadata-driven API framework.

At its core, FatFractal is essentially a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment that includes the middleware need to create a lightweight service bus for integrating business logic bus with backend services using RESTful APIs. The API that FatFractal creates for an application not only exposes a datastore, it lets the developer tap into an events model, object permissions by users/groups, authentication, a queries language, custom code as well as other service APIs on the backend. The Diffusion server layers on top of FatFractal to provide an engine for the publishing the data moving through the FatFractal NoServer in real time. The end result is a platform that requires solution providers and their customers to deliver services at scale without having to write as much code as other approaches to delivering an MBaaS platform.

Making use of what Bowen described as a Reactive Data Layer enabled by the Diffusion server from Push Technology, Bowen said organizations can more easily push data from public clouds out to endpoints in real time; regardless of whether that endpoint is a mobile device or an embedded system that needs data from an Internet of Things (IoT) application.

The good news for solution providers is that while MBaaS makes organizations more efficient in terms of building applications, there’s really nothing simple about building one. The better news is that demand for solution providers that have MBaaS expertise has never been higher; with no sign of slackening in sight any time soon.