IBM Pakistan is facilitating the National Mobile App Competition conceived by the Planning Commission of Pakistan. It aims to support budding IT developers by offering them a free platform to create their mobile apps. That’s right; IBM’s Bluemix will now help developers realize their dream apps.
What is Bluemix?
Bluemix is a cloud-based platform that is meant for the creation, management and running of all sorts of apps – be it a web-based app or one for smart devices. Being an open source platform, it sports a number of amenities in application monitoring, mobile back-end development and Java.
How is it free?
IBM is offering the service free of cost for the first 30 days. It’s important to note that it won’t mean developers will completely lose access to the platform once the trial concludes. They can continue using the platform but will only have to pay for anything other than the freebies on offer.
What does it include?
Speaking of the amenities that come courtesy of the free trial, there are three main ones that stand out. To begin with, developers will be able to enjoy unlimited use of IBM services of their choice. They will be able to run apps upto 2GB of the available memory. Finally, IBM will offer free extended support alongside. This means that developers would get responses to their help tickets free of charge.
How does Bluemix facilitate the development process?
Mobile Cloud boilerplate involves services such as Mobile Data, Mobile App Security and Push along with Node.js runtime. SDK as well as other sample apps are made available for students and professionals to begin developing the mobile apps which use these services. The idea is to make this less hectic and uncomplicated for all those invested in the process.
Once a developer creates a Mobile Cloud app, it gains access to Push, Mobile Data and Mobile App Security services. Server-side features like static files and URIs can also be offered courtesy of the Node.js app. Each of the Mobile Cloud apps comes with a distinct app ID. Developers will use the ID to access services relevant to the particular app.
Mobile Data is one of the three services that is complemented by an SDK meant for storage of data that can mask the data store implementation and management. Mobile App Security allows developers to control the behavior and access of apps active on smart devices using the Bluemix dashboard. Finally, Push is meant for sending notifications to Android and iOS platforms whenever needed.
You can download Mobile Data sample here.
You can download Push sample here.
You can download the Authentication sample here.
