Most people accept that mobile applications are the way of the future – as individuals spend more of their time on the road, or at least at work in varied locations, mobile access to core enterprise systems becomes ever more critical.
Which all works fine if you’re a new organization with no technical baggage to think about, but what about the plethora of existing organizations that have their mission critical systems sitting in something from SAP or
I’ve long been talking about a two tier approach to mobile, where organizations could take advantage of platforms that essentially “wrapped” their legacy solutions with an API layer on top of which they could build flexible mobile solutions.
Given this perspective, I was interested to hear from vendor DreamFactory. DreamFactory Software is focused on technology that enables developers to connect modern mobile apps to enterprise backend infrastructure in the cloud. Pretty much exactly what I talk about so much! Enterprises and their service providers use DreamFactory to build modern mobile apps and deploy them on any cloud or data center.
The company recently announced that Oracle application developers can now develop and deploy mobile applications that connect to Oracle databases. The new feature is a part of the core DreamFactory API platform and helps to REST-enable Oracle databases. When connected to an Oracle database, DreamFactory instantly exposes all available interfaces and creates comprehensive API documentation. This simplifies the process of securely connecting an Oracle backend database with a mobile front end app.
In terms of the details, this new addition to the platform allows developers to:
- Connect securely to Oracle 8i (and higher) and Oracle 10g (and higher) databases
- Configure an Oracle database as a service in the DreamFactory admin console, and gain instant access to an auto-generated REST API
- Easily build mobile apps that leverage Oracle data for every popular frontend mobile framework, using DreamFactory's SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, Titanium, AngularJS, and JavaScript
DreamFactory has already seen 30,000 infdividual developers download its services platform and reports that many developers have been pushing for Oracle support. The functionality the existing platform brought wil be extended to Oracle including:
- Master Credentials – the master credentials for a remote Oracle database are encrypted in DreamFactory
- Data Security – the permissions granted by the Oracle credentials you specify are honored by the REST API
- Lookup Keys – the REST API can inherit the same permissions on the remote database, based on user roles
- Record-Level Access – DreamFactory enables fine-grained control of records inside a given table
- Query Filters – the DreamFactory Oracle interface supports filter strings from REST API calls. Any number of logical operations can be performed in a query filter
- Related Objects – the REST API delivers an array of objects and related objects in a sub-array with a single API call
- Stored Procedures and Views – the REST API supports the ability to call Oracle stored procedures and SQL views
- Paging and Sorting – the REST API provides URL parameters to limit records returned and sort data before delivering the records to the client
- Continue or Rollback – the REST API provides parameters to continue processing an array of objects in spite of errors, or to rollback the entire operation if any error is encountered
- Schema Support –use the REST API to return information about what tables are available, as well as access rights for each table and field
- Schema Editor – DreamFactory provides an interactive schema editor for Oracle databases. Use the schema API to move schema between databases or dynamically set up tables.
This is a really compelling story and certainly helps to enable organizations to navigate a path between today’s technology landscape and the mobile/contextual paradigm which will quickly become the standard. I’m looking forward to watchinig DreamFactory progress.
