Evan Shortiss

Evan Shortiss

Recent Posts

Integrating Intercede RapID with Red Hat Mobile and OpenShift

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By Evan Shortiss

At Red Hat Mobile we understand the need for a flexible product that enables our customers to integrate with the tools they need to build their current and future applications. Our position as a leading contributor to the Kubernetes project ensures that the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers this tremendous flexibility to customers and end users.

Red Hat Mobile also supports highly flexible integrations to a range of 3rd party services and products. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how Red Hat Mobile v4 and OpenShift v3 enable customers to rapidly deploy and secure their mobile applications by integrating with a third party product provided by Intercede. We’ll be using Intercede’s RapID product to enable two-way TLS (often referred to as Client Certificate Authentication or CCA) for our mobile application.

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Using New Relic in Red Hat Mobile Node.js Applications

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By Evan Shortiss

Introduction

New Relic is an application-monitoring platform that provides in-depth analytics and analysis for applications regardless of the type of environment where they are deployed, or as New Relic put it themselves:

“Gain end-to-end visibility across your customer experience, application performance, and dynamic infrastructure with the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform.” – New Relic

You might ask why there’s a use for New Relic’s monitoring capabilities when Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP) and OpenShift Container Platform both offer insights into the CPU, Disk, Memory, and general resource utilization of your server-side applications. While these generic resource reports are valuable, they might not offer the detail required to debug a specific issue. Since New Relic is built as an analytics platform from the ground up it is capable of providing unique insights into the specific runtime of your applications. For example, the JavaScript code deployed in Node.js applications is run using the V8 JavaScript engine which has a life-cycle that can have a significant impact on the performance of your application depending on how you’ve written it. Utilizing New Relic’s Node.js module provides a real-time view of V8 engine performance and how they might be affecting the performance of your production application. By using this data, you can refine your application code to reduce memory usage, which in turn can free CPU resources due to less frequent garbage collections. Neat!

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Developing Mobile Applications using TypeScript on Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

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By Evan Shortiss

As of its release 2.19, the Red Hat Mobile JavaScript Client SDK contains a TypeScript definition file. By providing type definitions our JavaScript SDK can easily be used in applications developed using TypeScript. As a developer with a few years of JavaScript experience, I was initially skeptical of TypeScript, but after using it for a short period, I’m not sure how I ever managed without it! In this post, I take a look at the benefits TypeScript offers and demonstrate how you can get up and running with an application written in TypeScript on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

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Local Development Setup for Red Hat Mobile using Docker

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By Evan Shortiss

Getting up and running with local development for Red Hat Mobile Application requires that you run MongoDB and Redis locally. Doing so isn’t particularly difficult if you follow online guides, but it would be much more straightforward if you could just get these pieces of software up and running in a single command and not need to worry about versioning, creating data directories, setting permissions, and compiling some things such as Redis from source. It would be even better if you could easily switch versions. This is where containers shine.

In the next few paragraphs, we’ll demonstrate how you can run any almost any version of MongoDB and Redis with a single command on a machine that has the Docker service installed.

NOTE: This is not an extensive Docker CLI tutorial; just enough to learn basic commands that will allow you to get MongoDB and Redis up and running easily.

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Improving User Experience using The Cloud – Reducing Response Sizes

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By Evan Shortiss

In part one of this series of blog posts, we discussed the importance of user experience within the mobile industry, and how your API has a significant effect on this. In the this article, we’ll outline a number of techniques that you can leverage on an MBaaS solution such as Red Hat Mobile Application Platform to reduce the data downloaded by mobile devices when they make requests to your RESTful API.

Reducing the size of a response is conceptually simple; the fewer bits you’re pushing through a connection, the less time a user spends waiting for said bits to download. To minimize the size of the payload we’re sending back, we will:

  • Add gzip compression to our responses
  • Strip data that the client doesn’t utilise from responses
  • Avoid sending any data to the device by using the ETag header

We’ve prepared a sample application that will be updated as we progress through this series of blog posts. You can find the starting point code here with a README.

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Improving user experience for mobile APIs using the cloud

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By Evan Shortiss

For your end users, one of the most important aspects of your API is the perceived response time — if your mobile application takes an excessive amount of time to load data, users will get frustrated.  

In this series of blog posts, we’ll cover three ways to approach building a RESTful API that leads to better user experience by minimizing perceived response time. These strategies include: processing requests quickly, reducing payload sizes, and eliminating requests entirely, or only downloading data that has changed. And, we’ll show you how to do each by providing sample node.js code that can be deployed ‘as is’ on Red Hat Mobile Application Platform to build a better mobile API.  

But, before getting into each strategy, why are these important? The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are extremely important to the success of mobile applications.

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Continuous Integration and Deployment for Red Hat Mobile Cloud Applications using Circle CI

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By Evan Shortiss

In today’s fast paced world of business, delivering quickly is a top priority. Doing so is difficult, however, if you lack confidence in your codebase or rely on error prone deployment processes. Continuous integration enables development teams to automatically run test cases prior to merging code into a stable branch, while continuous deployment leverages automation to provide more reliable, faster deployments of that code.

Red Hat Mobile Application Platform supports an agile approach to developing, integrating, and deploying enterprise mobile applications—whether native, hybrid, or on the web. The platform supports collaborative development across multiple teams and projects, and a wide variety of leading tool kits and frameworks. You gain central control over security and policy management, the ease of Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) integration with enterprise systems, and a variety of cloud deployment options.

In this article we’ll demonstrate how a Red Hat Mobile Application Cloud Application or mBaaS Service can be configured for continuous integration (CI) via CircleCI, and for continuous deployment (CD) to the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

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