Solving the Cloud Computing Impasse with MBaaS (Abstract Only)

Students raised on tablets and smart phones have a lot of expectations: data that is instantly available on all of their devices; social media integration so they can share that data with their friends; and push notifications, so that responses from their friends get the attention that they deserve. Unfortunately, the vendor-specific technologies required to make this magic happen are daunting, to put it mildly, well beyond the scope of a beginning mobile computing course. However, the last 2 years has seen the emergence of a new technology, Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), that is vendor-agnostic and suitable for novice developers. This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to this technology. Participants will be provided source code for Pigs Ahoy!, an implementation of the famed dice game Pig that lacks cloud storage and social media integration. During the course of the workshop, participants will add that functionality, and in the process of doing so, acquire a sufficiently detailed knowledge of MBaaS that they can confidently incorporate it into their classes. Because MBaaS is vendor-agnostic, participants may work on either iOS or Android versions of Pigs Ahoy!: full instructions will be provided in both Swift and Java, as well as snapshots of Pigs Ahoy! at various stages of completion, so that no one need fear being left behind. There are multiple MBaaS providers, and they offer similar capabilities and approaches. We will concentrate on the most popular, parse.com.