we produced a neat little video about the founders of apiOmat, so you can get to know them and the goals for apiOmat better.
The video is originally in german, because it sounds quite funny when we speak english for more than 30 sec, but it has an english subtitle. So feel free to get to know us and our product better.

After the script is finished you can start programming against the apiOmat backend. For tutorials see our documentation. A comparsion of the android client code between parse and apiomat can be found here.

Install

1. Go to SignUp to create a new account on apiOmat. If you already have an account login and create a new app.
2. Deploy your app to our cloud by pressing the deploy icon.
3. Copy your ‘ApiKey’ from the App-Setup in our dashboard. Take also note of the selected system in the left panel (TEST, STAGING or LIVE).
4. Install pip on your system.
5. Type ‘pip install import-parse-to-apiOmat’ on the command line to install the python script into your system.
6. Go to Parse dashboard and export your data as zip (Under settings->Export data). For details see this link.
7. After you received the mail with your data, save them on your harddisk.

Usage

import-parse-to-apiOmat --ifile=<path_to_zipfile> --appName=<appName> --apiKey=<apiKey> --userMail=<userMail> --password=<password> --system=<usedSystem> --defaultPwd=<default_pw_for_users>

Explanation of parameters:

• –ifile Insert here filesystem path to the downloaded zip-file
• –appName The name of your app in apiOmat system
• –apiKey The apiKey from the apiOmat system copied in step 3 above
• –userMail Your e-mail address which you used to register in our dashboard
• –password Your password which you use to login in our dashboard
• –system The system (LIVE , STAGING or TEST) where you are going to import your data. (If you have selected the basic plan you can only import into LIVE system)
• –defaultPwd Default password for imported users

Example

import-parse-to-apiOmat --ifile=9339.zip --appName=ParseImport --apiKey=2234224 --userMail=login@apiomat.org --password=12345 --system=LIVE --defaultPwd=12345

Known Issues

• Can’t import binary files, this Parse data format will be converted to a String and saves only the URL to the data
• No support for arrays with mixed types
• Can’t import passwords from existing users. The password for existing users would be resetted to given password, bacause we won’t decrypt passwords from Parse users
• Actual no support for ACL (coming to apiOmat soon)

You can find the source code in our github repository

To minimize transfered data our REST interface and our mobile client SDKs support both the HTTP header If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match. How this works will be described below.

If-Modified-Since

On a GET request the client send an additional If-Modified-Since header with a timestamp as value. The server can react with the 2 following possibilities:
1. Server responds with response-code 200, a Modified-Since Header and the data in the body
2. The response-code from server is 304 and the body is empty

The second case will happen if the requested data on the server was not modified since the given timestamp. At apiOmat this works for GET requests on single objects. The following cURL example will explain it (for simplification we use -I option to send a HEAD request and get only HTTP headers back):

$ curl -I https://apiomat.org/yambas/rest/apps/TaskManager/models/TaskManagerMain/Task/51482cbae4b0891c605f4099 \
 -u __user_creds__ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-apiomat-apikey: __key__"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:21:07 GMT
Last-Modified: 19 Mar 13 10:18:33:629 CET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Server: Jetty(7.6.9.v20130131)

#Send same request again with If-Modified-Since Header and value from Modified-Since Response
$ curl -I https://apiomat.org/yambas/rest/apps/TaskManager/models/TaskManagerMain/Task/51482cbae4b0891c605f4099 \
-u __user_creds__ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-apiomat-apikey: __key__" \
 -H 'If-Modified-Since: 19 Mar 13 10:18:33:629 CET'

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:23:04 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Jetty(7.6.9.v20130131)

#HTTP Response-Code is 304

Possible values for If-Modified-Since Header

The HTTP standard specifies that timestamp should be sent according to RFC 1123 standard. But this format only takes care on seconds. This is not enough for request against apiOmat REST interface, so we accept only following format which includes also milliseconds:

dd MMM yy HH:mm:ss:SS CET

An example follows:

19 Mar 13 10:18:33:629 CET

Etag/If-None-Match Header

How you can check if a list of objects has changed? If you send an If-None-Match header with your GET request on a list then the server answer with one of the two following possibilities:
1. Returns the data, response-code 200 and an ETag header
2. Returns 304 as response-code and NO data if data hash is equal (and so not modified) to sent If-None-Match header value

#Get list of task models
$ curl -v https://apiomat.org/yambas/rest/apps/TaskManager/models/TaskManagerMain/Task/ \
-u __user_creds__ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-apiomat-apikey: __key__

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:32:29 GMT
ETag: "1-2114886209"
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: Jetty(7.6.9.v20130131)

#send request again with If-None-Match header and ETag value from previous HTTP response
$ curl -v https://apiomat.org/yambas/rest/apps/TaskManager/models/TaskManagerMain/Task/ \
-u __user_creds__ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-apiomat-apikey: __key__ \
-H "If-None-Match: 1-2114886209"

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:38:08 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Jetty(7.6.9.v20130131)
...
#HTTP Response-Code ist 304

Support caching in client SDKs

If you use our iOS, Java or Android SDK then all is prepared to save bandwidth, cause we sent the previous explained headers already. A local cache keeps all returned data and return this values if response-code from server is equal to 304.

If you want to disable caching explicit, then you have to call following method for iOS:

[DataStore setCachingStrategy:AOM_NO_CACHE];

For Android and Java the method call equals to:

Datastore.setCachingStrategy( Datastore.AOMCacheStrategy.NO_CACHE );

As you can see we take care of your limited data flatrates and the “white” areas of no network connection.

So after two long days at the CeBIT we are finally sitting stranded on a station and waiting for the next train after Deutsche Bahn fooled us… Time to write down some impressions…

We arrived at Hannover yesterday in the morning started the day with some brand-new information from Mozillas evangelist Christian Heilmann about Firefox OS. Everything in Mozillas new mobile operating system is based on HTML5. The Javascript code that was shown seemed really simple and cool. We assume mozilla learned from all failures others did before. The question will be if there is enough place for another operating system in this market. Mozilla tries to bring smartphones to people who don’t want to invest so many bucks into highend-Androids or iPhones. The first phone will be available for 150$  told us. And they do not only have the manufactures already they also have contracts with 18 carriers.

The session took place at the moosecon, a new conference that was organized in Hall 17 of the CeBIT. moosecon is The Mobile Operating Sytems Conference at CeBIT. When we saw this conference we decided to submit a session that was luckily accepted. We presented “Creating Backends in minutes with backend as a service” on Wednesday afternoon and the closed area of the conference was quite good filled.

It seems that backend as a service is actual very interesting for developers. We discussed the possibilities and developed an example of a backend and an android-app for storing tasks live in less than 15 minutes. Discussion afterwards showed that people were impressed by what is possible with apiOmat in such a short time. The audience was very interested and asked qualified questions.

After our talk we had some time looking around at the CeBIT. You can see some impressions here:

BIG SERVERS

BIG SCREENS

3D Printer

Helicopter

We didn’t see anything completely new this year but perhaps we missed a lot of things

On Thursday we watched Marcus Ross presenting about PhoneGap that is now called Apache Cordova. The possibilities of the cross-platform html5 framework were extended in the last years in a way that it can really be useful in projects now. The possibility to write own native plugins seems promising. All people who want some more information should read the book Marcus wrote. He is not only an entertainer but also a good trainer and teacher as we know.

While we were walking through the halls in the afternoon we took time to talk to some app-developing companies and discuss about backend as a service with them. It seems that most companies have had an own stack for some backend-things but are absolutely willing to exchange these things if they can switch to a BaaS hosted in Germany. With that shine future we left the CeBIT and got into railway problems…

What we at apiOmat think a customer needs is a possibility to start restore of your own data by yourself, without any cost and instantly. Therefore we created a new goodie for you, the Restore module.

To use it, simple at the module on App Setup page to your app, you will find it in the Tools section then. Select the day to restore from, hit the restore button – finished! And, of course, you can restore the data separately for your live and test system.

Last year we have done a lot of research. We have invested endless hours of freetime to develop and promote apiOmat.

We talked to developers, early adopters and innovators from the betahaus Berlin over the MobileCamp Dresden and the iPhone DevCon Cologne to the mLove ConFestival in Saxony-Anhalt. The positive feedback from all of these encouraged us to find an investor.

No sooner said than done we are proud to pronounce that we closed our seed-funding round with TGFS, a local venture capital fund in Saxony.

Of course apiOmat was part of the session plan. Our session about Backend as a Service attracted about 50 participants.

Two of fifty Participants had even heard about baas . Therefore the focus of the session was the functionality of backend as a service and its key benefits. We asked the participants why they would use apiOmat and the main reasons were time and cost savings. Especially the topic data security raised a lot of questions. But we wipe away all the major concerns.

Lutz and Philipp had much fun to listen to Stefan Munz. He talked about „KIF- iPhone Test Automation“. Interesting was also the night coding session. We look forward to iPhone DevCon in 2013.

The main BaaS selection criteria for developers are availability across platforms and the flexibility of the service. E.g. the ability to implement custom business logic seems to be a very important aspect. Further more the richness of the feature set is considered important too. Up to 28% of backend as a service users are using indicated data management and 18% use indicated user management and authentication. Developers also named push notifications and content management, file storage (7%), cloud code (custom logic) (6%) and social graphs (3%) as indispensable features.The survey reveals that the ease of integration and use as well as stability and performance are important to almost 25% of all developers using backend services. Developer tools like BaaS have become a developer attractor because of their flexibility in pricing and the usage based cost structure. Developers can scale their apps based on the actual usage while costs are growing or decreasing adequately.

Final result: Backend-as-a-service is in early stages, but has a huge potential. It contains great benefits for developers and reduces financial risks.