Sharing the challenged in building a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) platform for Appcelerator Alloy apps using Joomla and a whole host of development tools for a London based startup where I am CTO

1. Angus Fox - @nuxnix
CTO, Piota, @Piotasocial, http://www.piota.co.uk
Director, @Multizone, http://www.multizone.co.uk
Secretary, Social Developers London, @socdevlon
https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/angus-fox/0/b16/457
LondonTitanium User Group
9 June 2015

2. Background Objectives Solutions Challenges
Conclusions
Questions /
Discussion
Zendesk
ticket
giveaway

3.  Multizone is an award winning software company providing
 CTO-to-go and mobile app development services for startups and
enterprises working in mobile, social, collaboration and eDiscovery
 Product management using talented community specialists for
development
▪ FirstAutomatedTest system for native phone apps 2004, Symbian)
▪ Our first Mobile Back End as a Service (MBaaS) built in 2008 on Appcelerator
▪ First MBaaS on the UK governmentG-Cloud supplier list
 Piota, is a privately funded early stage startup based in London.
 Idea genesis in 2014
 Piota required native mobile apps for the Education sector.
 Need to scale to support thousands of individually branded mobile
apps each supporting hundreds of users
 First app published December 2014 to App Store and Google Play
 Three dozen now in the stores, not all production yet

6.  App has to be better
than good
 Don’t build an app that
loads foreign content like
HTML or PDF
 Don’t build a web site on
a phone
 Do make it disruptive
 Do get the right team
 Do build the right
features (that’s the art of
product management
bit)

7. App Screens
 Home
 News
 Events / Calendar
 Info
 Contacts
 Push notification
 Forms
 Surveys

8.  Any item can be a push
notification
 Push goes via
Appcelerator cloudAPI
endpoint, mapped to
Apple and Google push
API
 Custom code runs as a
cron job
 And, yes, it does work on
an AppleWatch

9.  Why Joomla?...
 Stable & Secure
 Mobile Friendly
 Great to develop on
 All the good stuff there...
 OO & MVC
 jQuery
 Bootstrap
 Huge time-saver compared to writing from
scratch, provides many required features out-of-
the-box

10.  Uses Joomla! Front-end
 EachApp back-end has a separate Joomla!
install
 One custom template, branded per App
 Visually customised to match look & feel
 Extension for structured data - FieldsAttatch
 Extension for json RESTful API - jBackend
 Load of other glue we wrote

11.  Use as much of the
core functionality as
possible
 Keep the number of
extensions low
 Make the template
adaptable and
responsive

12. Paul Ryan, Angus Fox, Bronwyn Goodwin, Andy Gaskell
Not as illustrated 

13. So we made Apps...lots of ‘em

14.  Founder, Intensely involved
in school governance, Likes
Apps,Wants to build a
business
 CTO, 30 years in Product
management at Oracle,
Microsoft, HP, Startups
 App Dev: General + UI +Web
 App Dev: General + CI/CD
Delivery
 Web Dev: PHP, JavaScipt,
CSS etc
 Sales and Marketing
Director: Experienced in
education apps
 All remote
 Assembla + Skype, little or no
email
 Weekly conf call – ticket
review
 Monthly meetings
 2 week development cycles,
mostly
 Front end and back-end
working closely
 agile but not Agile
 Auto prioritisation of the
work – no surprises

15. ● simplify development processes for adding new schools via
task automation
● daily builds of app using Continuous Integration (CI)
● automate workflow of app release to beta testers (cross
platform)
● automate workflow for all provisioning steps, including push
notification on ACS
● change app structure to use dynamic data rather than static
configuration
● provide a customer sign up and configuration process

16. JavaScript
Calabash
Xcode

17. ● App uses single code base with
multiple themes
● Grunt task runner loads correct
tiapp.xml and config.json
● tiapp.xml node package used to
inject common values
● Grunt tasks use same
convention to aid ease of use
o grunt build:school:android,
o grunt build:school:ios,
o grunt build:school
o grunt build
o grunt test:school:android,
o grunt test:school:ios
o etc.

18. Assembla is used as
Source Code Repo and
Project Collaboration
Tool
Go Server used as CI
server
Merge/Pull request
approvals in assembla
trigger builds on the go
server

19. ● Google PublisherAPI used to deliver .apk
updates, screenshots and meta data updates.
● Screenshot production automated with
Grunt.
● Release to beta track on playstore
● Google Plus community used for alpha
members (invite only)

20. ● fastlane tools used for
iTunes Connect (ITC)
automation
https://fastlane.tools/
● provisioning profiles
created/updated on the fly
using fastlane/sigh
● screenshots created using
fastlane/screenshots and
instruments
● updates can optionally to
testflight release

22. ● cloud enable new ti apps from command line
● fastlane/pem used to automate push
notification certificate creation
● phantomjs/casperjs used to add push
certificates to app on ACS

23. ● App changed to reduce static config settings
with dynamic data
● Appropriate fallback to maintain user
experience

24. ● Give customer facility to choose (limited)
colours and icons
● Generate alloy theme on the fly and apply it
at build time

25. ● Apple and Google regulations for what can
and cannot be automated
● Testflight switch off /Testflight on iTunes
Connect (ITC)
● Appcelerator 4.0 / Platform changes
● Maturity of third party solutions
● Target environments not static

26.  Initially running on shared hosting, ok for 30
back-ends.
 Moved to a ManagedCloud Server
 New backends created from a backup seed
file.
 Scripted deployment

27.  A reliable and automated CI build system is
very complex to create
 ManyApp submission related tasks are not
easily automated
 iTunes submissions still get rejected for
random reasons
 Android fragmentation is not really an issue
 App stores don’t really want you to automate

28.  Develop with the future in mind
 Try not to accumulate technical debt
 App developers are not back end developers
 Ci / Cd is a specialism
 Users are typically quite non-technical, so
keep UI simple - things need to “just work”
 Write a good base API and evolve it
 APIs are just awesome
 “Shell” scripting in JavaScript / Node.js is
quite nice actually

29. Presentations are available from Slideshare
Slides
http://www.slideshare.net/nuxnix
Commercial Hackathon
Possibly 25-26 July – London - PAID
email me : angusf@piota.co.uk

30. King's Place, LONDON, UK
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-art-of-customer-satisfaction-2015-london-
tickets-16893983359
Email me