E-Guide

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Service (BaaS) is making

waves in the mobile application development space. In this e-guide, learn how you
can implement BaaS and how it functions
similarly to Platform as a Service (PaaS). Additionally, learn how
incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) with mobile worker support can enhance business productivity.

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DEVELOPERS GET INTO BAAS, MOBILE APIS FOR NEW

OPPORTUNITIES
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Tom Nolle, CIMI Corporation

A new development in the application programming interface (API) market,
Backend as a Service (BaaS), offers developers a whole new dimension of opportunity: cloud services to build the mobile applications of the future.
Mobility, mobile broadband and mobile apps are transforming the Internet and the way people communicate and use information. For developers, the
mobile app represents an enormous, lucrative new market. From a business
perspective, each of the mobile platforms has its own benefits and limitations.
Each also has its technical framework -- its own APIs. Mobile development
platform APIs generally fall into two categories: platform APIs related to the
mobile devices own operating system and middleware, and service APIs related to the access of Web-hosted material.
The new opportunity in APIs is Backend as a Service, an extension of the
service API model. The goal of BaaS is to convert common and useful elements
of mobile application logic -- storage, identity management, social network
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integration, photo enhancing -- into representational state transfer (REST)

Web services that the application invokes as needed, making these services
back ends to mobile apps.
As a concept, BaaS is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform
as a Service (PaaS): It offers functionality as a Web service. With SaaS, whats
offered is an application or application component. Salesforce.coms CRM is
a good example. PaaS offers a collection of services designed to present a complete virtual operating system; Microsofts Windows Azure is the best-known
PaaS example. BaaS is somewhere in between; it offers PaaS-like features,
but not as a complete programming platform. Like SaaS, those features might
perform business functions oriented to vertical markets or functionalities
that can be used across industries. In all cases, though, BaaS aims to enhance
mobile development.
IMPLEMENTING BAAS

Success with BaaS requires a targeted business case and careful implementa
tion to support mobile development practices. Most BaaS deployments today
are horizontal -- they cover a variety of markets -- and deal with well-known issues such as social network integration. The problem with these types of BaaS
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implementations is that they are so obvious that competition is inevitable,

and so basic that differentiation is difficult. For example, its likely that major
cloud providers will move into BaaS services related to storage and identity, and
social network companies will offer social network BaaS integration. Vertical
markets, where a developer already has skills, contacts and software products,
are useful places to look into for BaaS opportunity. In horizontal markets, data
analysis and reduction tools, or forecasting and projection tools, are good candidates for BaaS.
Technically, the key issue for BaaS is preserving the dominant RESTful
Web service model of interface. These interfaces appear as a simple PUT/GET
transactional model that doesnt remain in a processing state between calls.
Most of the major PUT/GET giants have exposed their own service APIs as
RESTful interfaces that receive and respond using XML data structures. XML
handling can be a chore, however, and its helpful to either accept a simpler data
structure or provide programming logic to use the interface as a reusable function in each of the target mobile devices.
Creating a BaaS service with the correct level of functional granularity is
also important. Mobile users typically expect a quick response to a request, and
there are interface timing issues that make it unadvisable to turn a complex
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function with a long execution time into a single service. Since RESTful interfaces are expected to be stateless, care is required in turning a complex function into a series of elements that can be used independently, but can function
together when needed. Each request must stand on its own, and data from the
response to a given request, if needed later, must be stored in the device and
returned or maintained and updated by the service.
PASSING AS PAAS

Perhaps the most significant aspect of BaaS, from the developers perspective,
is the relationship with PaaS. Any developer who has reviewed the APIs for
search or social network giants, or for cloud management, knows that multiple
APIs typically form an ecosystem that, if it grows large enough, can approach
the functionality of a platform, as in PaaS. A few disconnected BaaS APIs are
less compelling than, for example, an entire BaaS ecosystem aimed at supporting mobile-social network collaboration for enterprises. Popular open source
blogging or chat room tools, for instance, could be built on unified communications and collaboration, augmented with APIs to create voice and video calls.
BaaS will lead to a systematized view of background services for mobile development, which is for all practical purposes a mobile-driven PaaS platform.
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Developers, operators and enterprises need to think about this evolution -- because a cooperative and symbiotic collection of BaaS tools are more valuable
to developers and consumers than individual APIs could ever be. The BaaS
movement could be a catalyst for moving developer focus from devices to the
cloud -- and that means faster service and increased competition among handset vendors. But BaaS, like any cloud trend, is in the early stages, and theres a
whole mobile world out there.

How to make design

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HOW TO MAKE DESIGN CHOICES AS MOBILE AND IOT

APPLICATIONS COLLIDE
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Tom Nolle, CIMI Corporation

The Internet of Things has been getting considerable coverage, causing companies to explore ways IoT concepts can enhance productivity. Often, this
research leads to one specific IoT model that shows promise: combining IoT
with mobile worker support. Architects and planners charged with designing for this model must understand what the mobile/IoT model really means,
address how adding IoT changes the equation in mobile empowerment, and
define their own design pattern to represent how mobile/IoT applications will
be handled going forward.
Most legitimate IoT applications involve interaction between users and
what could be called a sensor and control network (SCN). In process control
applications, the SCN is a machine-to-machine, or M2M, network that uses
sensor information to drive changes in material handling or processing. These
applications might use mobile technology as a means of communicating with
sensors, but they dont force major changes in application design as normal
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industrial control applications would.

Mobile and IoT applications collide in applications where a worker is visualized as moving through a sensor and control space and interacting with
elements. If their full potential is to be realized, these applications require very
different design concepts than normal mobile or IoT applications do.
TAKING THE FIRST STEP

The first step in designing mobile/IoT applications is to ensure enterprise architecture process models are up to date and reflect the business information
flows and activity sequences the mobile/IoT application will generate. Many
early attempts at harnessing the benefits of mobile/IoT failed because those
benefits werent linked to specific enterprise processes and flows, and so neither could be validated or supported.
The second step in mobile/IoT application design is understanding whats
in the SCN space. Is the application one where a worker gets information from
sensors, one where a worker activates networked control elements to perform a
specific task, or both? The answer will determine the best starting point for new
application design -- is it contextual in nature or registration and activation?
When mobile workers get sensor information from an IoT application,
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that information can be viewed as enhancing the notion of context that forms
the underpinning of all mobile empowerment applications. This approach
embodies two broad alternative models: the extended-senses model and the
sensor-driven model.
Extended-senses models use IoT sensors to augment what a worker can
know about the current context -- the point of activity. Generally, a workers
location establishes what IoT sensor information is available nearby, and that
information is collected automatically into the workers contextual inventory,
to be processed as any context data would be. This is an easy model to implement because it extends, but doesnt change, the application model for mobile
empowerment.
In a sensor-driven model, the application identifies a situation that needs
handling based on sensor information, and then alerts and perhaps dispatches
the worker to the right spot. This model differs sharply from normal mobility
applications because the worker is driven by the application rather than driving
it. The context of the job is set by the conditions at the point where the worker
is expected to be active, and the goal is getting the worker there.

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The key ingredient in this sensor-driven model is identifying an alert condition in the first place. If a sensor and control network is already being used for
process control, facilities monitoring and so on, it might be possible to generate a trigger for IoT/mobile activity from the current process or monitoring
application. Taking that approach is wise because it reduces the risk of loading
down sensors or sensor networks with additional traffic. If its not possible to
piggyback on current process or monitoring applications, sensor information
will need to be analyzed.
If possible, avoid reading sensors from a new application. Most sensor and
control applications store sensor data in a database regularly. By running analytics processes on stored data, it might be easier to spot unusual conditions.
For example, temperature and humidity changes are easier to view as a trend
line because any sudden change would be unusual and likely warrant a visit
from a technician. Using DBMS-based analytics as the source of IoT context
also will reduce the complexity of finding and reading relevant sensors.
The final point is the importance of consistency. Virtually every user
who has looked at the mobile/IoT combination will admit that many applications would fit that description, but few represent the low-hanging fruit that
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typically drive projects in a new technology area. A major risk is that each application could produce its own software based on a unique approach, and that
would compromise application agility and component reuse. It could also create operational problems if the worker empowerment element varied between
applications.
Software architects and developers know the accepted way to address these
risks is the creation of a design pattern, a template-like approach to a problem
that can be implemented as needed. For applications blending mobility and
IoT, a design pattern would likely be needed for both the extended-senses and
sensor-driven models. Its possible to conceptualize a design pattern that accepted a condition set that represents testable sensor conditions and an optional worker location, and returned a set of values representing sensor results.
It can be tempting to jump in to API design too quickly. Be sure to have
enough exposure to the complete range of mobile/IoT applications, at least at
the business process level, before committing to specific componentization
and API design. Taking the intermediate step of developing one or more formal
design patterns will ensure the API transition is made with a broad knowledge
of the needs and opportunities the union of mobility and IoT can bring.

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