Nearly half of the world’s population owns a smartphone. With recent world events changing the way people interact with even brick-and-mortar businesses, it has never been more critical for businesses of all types to have a mobile presence. But building a mobile app can be costly and time-consuming, right?
Built specifically with rapid development in mind, Backendless is seeking to change that mentality. Backendless is a mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) platform designed to facilitate all backend tasks, ranging from database and user management to push notifications, business logic, and API service development, deployment, and maintenance. Backendless will soon be releasing a major new version that will further expand the platform into frontend development with a drag-and-drop UI builder.
SourceForge recently caught up with Mark Piller, Founder and CEO of Backendless, to talk about the latest in application development software and the benefits of backend as a service for businesses ranging from startups to enterprises. Piller details the strengths of the Backendless platform and the value it offers to developers of all levels. Piller also explains how Backendless promotes working with a remote development team. Piller founded Backendless in 2012 and has bootstrapped the company into a major player in the mBaaS industry without any outside investment capital.
Q: First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was Backendless established and what are your goals?
Mark Piller, Backendless
A: Backendless was founded in 2012 with the goal of providing application developers a means to more quickly develop and deploy the backend of their applications. We serve primarily mobile apps, but we also have many customers that use our platform for their web apps as well. Building an app can be daunting, and it’s easy for a new developer to get bogged down in the myriad programming languages and database and server hosting sites. We wanted to provide a one-stop-shop for all things backend so that developers can focus on the elements that are most critical to their customers, like the user interface.
We offer three primary products: Backendless Cloud, Backendless Pro, and Managed Backendless. Cloud is commonly used by developers with smaller projects that are looking to add to an existing app or launch a brand-new app from scratch. We host their backend in our cloud infrastructure and handle all server architecture and maintenance. With Pro, developers can host our software on their own servers and the only limits are what their servers can facilitate. Managed Backendless is a combination of the two, where all limits are removed, but our team still manages the server infrastructure for the application.
Q: What industries do you serve and who are your current customers? What size businesses do you serve?
A: Backendless serves virtually all industries, including food service, transportation, banking, travel, social media, education, and consumer goods. We have clients of all sizes from around the globe. Many of our clients will use our free-to-start Cloud platform to explore our service and functionality, then select the product that best suits their needs. For example, an enterprise-level customer will often elect to use Backendless Pro if they have their own internal development team, or they may select Managed Backendless if they would prefer to outsource some of the management functions to our team.
We also have many startup-level users that rely on our platform exclusively to support their application. Some of these startups have reached significant user growth, which we are fully capable of supporting with the Backendless Cloud product.
Q: How does Backendless address security in a world increasingly concerned about online privacy?
A: Backendless takes security very seriously. We offer a number of built-in systems to help protect our users’ data. For example, Backendless provides roles-based security support that allows developers to assign roles to their client app’s users. These roles can be customized to restrict and allow access to different aspects of the application. Using this approach, our users’ APIs are also secured because someone trying to improperly use an API would need administrator-level login credentials to circumvent the security functions.
Additionally, we provide roles-based access for backend administrators as well, meaning that you can allow new dev team members access to your backend without worrying about them viewing or editing parts of the backend that are off-limits.
Q: Increasingly, companies may have existing APIs that will need to be migrated to or shared with a new platform. How does Backendless support API Management so customers do not have to reinvent the wheel?
A: Our goal is to be the only API management software you need, but we also realize that there are a lot of legacy apps out there that have APIs that need to be maintained. We provide multiple options for users in this position. In addition to the wide array of pre-built APIs that we offer, including User Service, Data Service, Publish-Subscribe Messaging, Email, Push Notifications, Files, and many more, we also make it easy for users to import their own API services from the likes of PeopleSoft and SAP.
If importing your APIs is not ideal, we also can connect with external API hosting services like Apigee, Amplify, Azure, and Oracle to enable you to manage all of your APIs in one place. Then, you can use our intuitive platform to build new APIs that you can either host with us or export to another platform.
When you begin building new APIs, we support APIs that are built with Node.js or Java, plus we offer Codeless API development. Our Codeless system is a visual drag-and-drop logic builder that can be used to construct APIs, Timers, Event Handlers, and other backend logic your app needs.
Our system can also automatically generate API documentation, making it that much easier to share APIs built in Backendless with other systems. This also provides our customers with a tremendous resource when bringing in new team members as they can read documentation specific to the customer’s app.
Finally, Backendless Analytics tracks API usage in real-time, allowing you to identify what your users are doing within your app and help guide both development and server infrastructure decisions.
Q: Larger enterprise customers may be hesitant to shift to an mBaaS-based solution because of their existing database infrastructure. How does Backendless address this concern?
A: Indeed, many of the largest companies were early adopters of mobile technology and have had their own mobile apps for years. Additionally, many of these companies have decades-old database systems that they’ve been using since long before mobility was a concern. It’s not uncommon for legacy apps to have backends that have been Frankensteined-together over the years with various databases, backend languages, and mobile frameworks. A lot of these companies are looking to either build/rebuild their app for the next generation of mobile and web apps or modernize their existing apps. Either way, they don’t want to have to start from scratch.
Backendless is designed to work seamlessly with external databases, ERP, and SCM applications. Whether you want to transfer all of your data over to your Backendless Database or, more likely, connect your existing databases with your Backendless backend, we can make it happen. Whether it’s Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, or some other legacy system, Backendless can make sure your legacy data is preserved.
Q: Handling large user bases can be quite a challenge for app developers. How does Backendless facilitate user management in a way that is beneficial to businesses of all sizes?
A: User management is a huge need in the industry right now, particularly as app developers battle against bots and other forms of automation that can disrupt your app’s workflow. User
authentication and validation are two hugely important features that we include that make it easy for our customers to ensure that the users signing up for their app or service are legitimate. Additionally, we offer social logins for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn so end users aren’t obligated to create a new username and password for every app.
Validation is just the first step in the process, however. We also provide standard functions such as automatic user role assignment (primarily for security purposes), session timeout settings, and concurrent login settings. These allow customers to easily limit what users can see and do, log out users that are inactive, and control how many devices a user can log in from simultaneously.
Backendless also makes it very easy to create relations between data objects, which is invaluable when identifying relationships between users and their activity. Whether wanting to connect customers to their orders, create a social newsfeed, track an object’s geolocation, or any number of other uses, our system is extremely effective in doing so.
Q: Given the state of the world right now, being able to work remotely is increasingly imperative for development teams. As this is likely to continue beyond the current crisis, what does Backendless do to support development teams?
A: Backendless has long supported team-based development. We have recently introduced some new features to further expand this capability and make it easier for team leaders to feel confident allowing their team members access to the platform.
It has always been important to us that it be relatively easy to add and remove team members from your Backendless app. We built the platform such that new team members join with significant restrictions on what they can see and do so that an administrator is required to open up access as needed. We even went one step further, introducing visibility controls that allow admins to make certain sections of their Backendless app invisible to users that have no need to access that section, further securing the backend from tampering, accidental or otherwise.
Related Category: Application Development Software
Q: Tell us more about Backendless. What are its key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other mobile backend platforms available on the market?
A: Backendless has a long list of features that make it the most complete mBaaS solution on the market, many of which we’ve previously discussed. We could fill multiple articles with an exhaustive list, however here are a few that are most popular.
The Backendless push notification console is widely praised as being one of our most useful features. The console allows customers to send push notifications to any device, and the setup with our SDKs is relatively straightforward compared to some notification solutions. In the
console, you can customize push notifications as much as you desire, down to a unique image for each. You can easily segment your target audience, personalize the content based on the user’s activity, and more.
Another popular feature is our code generator, which allows you to instantly create the code needed to run a sample app utilizing one of our core functions like chat or geolocation. This generated code can then be added to your app to make integration of those features into your app even easier.
Backendless Database itself has many powerful features that other solutions are lacking. For example, you can switch Real-Time data on and off, giving you the option to process user inputs and deliver data the way you want. Also, Backendless is one of the few platforms that allows SQL-based searches on your data. Not only can you use SQL when looking through your database on the backend, you can also include SQL queries in your APIs to perform searches and calculations on data before you return it to the client app.
The thing that we feel truly sets us apart, however, is our support philosophy. Our goal is to make your development experience as smooth as possible, which is why we offer multiple avenues for getting help with your questions. First, we have a feature called Backendless Navigator within the platform that lets you type in a question and provides links to videos, blog articles, and documentation relevant to your search. If you can’t find the answer there, our support team is available on Slack and our forums to answer questions.
Q: Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the mobile development space and how is Backendless meeting these?
A: We believe that the world will continue to move toward simplification when it comes to mobile app development. In particular, we see a growing demand for app development services that appeal to coders and non-coders alike. That is why the focus of our upcoming Version 6 has been introducing two elements: a no-code frontend builder tool, and gamification. The frontend builder will make Backendless a true full-service app development platform, allowing users to build the entirety of their application on our platform. Gamification in Backendless will serve a dual purpose, both providing users a means to unlock certain features as well as acting as an educational tool for new users to learn and better understand our platform and backend development in general.
About Backendless
Backendless is a leading mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) provider that offers a cloud-based online platform, on-premises solution, and hybrid managed solution. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Backendless was founded in 2012 by Mark Piller and has grown to become one of the top backend service providers without any external investment capital. Backendless specializes in database management, API management, user management, business logic (Cloud Code), file management, and more.