Mobile Cloud Service by Example Part1: Defining and Implementing a Mock API

I'm really excited at the moment 

The release of Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) was unveiled yesterday, together with 24 new Platform and Infrastructure Cloud Services.

Why is this important?

Two words.....

"Mobile First"

“Mobile First” was first used by Marc Davis, who was Yahoo’s Chief Scientist and VP of Early Stage Products of Yahoo! Mobile.

Every company needs to think about a mobile strategy to have a future strategy. If you don't have one, then you just don't know it yet!

Going Mobile Cloud

14 months ago I decided to expand my horizons and go mobile. I have been taking MCS through its paces by :

• Developing REST API's in node.js as javascript (how the api's are implemented in MCS)
• Developing agnostic mobile applications to consume these API's

In this series of blogs I plan to:

• Introduce you to the concepts of MCS
• Give suggestions for best practices to adopt
• Demonstrate by example by taking you through real examples you can try and demo yourselves

What is Oracle Mobile Cloud Service?

Enterprise Level Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) delivered as a Mobile Platform (PaaS) solution on Oracle Cloud.

The successful implementation of any Enterprise Mobile solution requires:

• End to end Security
• Agnostic to mobile platforms e.g iOS, Android, html5
• REST APIs implementation with orchestration (in mcs this is using node.js)
• Centralised Management of the Mobile Applications
• Connectivity to enterprise resources on premise or in the cloud
• Scalable performance
• Mobile Analytics
• Platform APIs - e.g to manage push notifications & identity

MCS makes it easy to quickly implement an enterprise mobile solution in the cloud.

I'm not going to give you a long pitch about MCS. (that would be far too long for a blog and its not what I'm about).

Instead I want to get you up and running quickly using it.

For a quick overview of mcs:

• First watch this great introduction from our Product Management Team.
• (I also Encourage you also to subscribe to their Mobile Channel.)

Then read this quick article Build Your Mobile Strategy—Not Just Your Mobile Apps.

Creating a mock API in MCS

One of the first tasks for a service developer in MCS is to create an API with mock data and make that available quickly. This allows the Mobile Application developers to build their apps using live API data. In MCS we have several options to implement the mock data depending on the complexity of the use-case.

• Directly in the RAML definition
• As javascript in Custom Code.
• As JSON objects stored in MCS storage
• As database tables using the database API
• As external enterprise resources using REST or SOAP

The usecase - MobileMoney Mobile Application

Today I will take you through the first example.

We will use the example of a mobile payment app that allows the payment of funds from one mobile user to another using a telephone number or bank details. Mobile applications like this already exist from Denmark banking apps like Swipp and MobilePay

Example Demo Video - create a mock REST API in MCS

The following video shows how to create a mock REST API in MCS in a matter of mins. I will...

• Create a Mobile Backend called MobileMoney
• Create a REST API Mobile called payments
• Define a resource to query the past payments made
• Test the API in the MCS testing page
• Test the API from postman using basic security

I also encourage you to subscribe to the Oracle  to the A-Team youtube channel.