Developers get into BaaS, mobile APIs for new opportunities

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

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 device’s 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 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, what’s offered is an application or application component. Salesforce.com’s CRM is a good example. PaaS offers a collection of services designed to pres­ent a complete virtual operating system; Microsoft’s 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…

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