We’re excited to introduce Mike Schwartz, software architect at Modus Create and creator of SilkJS. In this guest blog post, Mike provides a great overview of how his team built a mobile address book application powered by DreamFactory on the back-end and Sencha Touch on the client.
In this blog post, I provide a quick overview of the application we built with DreamFactory and Sencha touch. If you’re a developer, the full case study is an excellent way to learn how the DreamFactory Services Platform works in practice with a real-world example. To dig deeper, you can fork the source code to the Address Book from GitHub here.
Background
DreamFactory partnered with Modus Create to port and enhance an existing address book application created by Modus Create to the new DreamFactory Services Platform (DSP). The address book application is for both mobile devices and has a desktop version for administration.
The existing enterprise address book application we had built called RoloDeux provided a simple, yet powerful facility to access and manage employee contact information from desktop computers or mobile devices.
The Ext JS-powered desktop web application was the management console, while the mobile version, employing Sencha Touch 2 framework, was meant to be an access point only. RoloDeux enjoyed a number of custom-built widgets on top of the base libraries, including a custom ExtJS 4 component called Ext.ux.SchemaGrid. This component handles the dynamic generation of ExtJS data store, grid column definitions, form for creation and editing of records, and URLs for performing API requests to do CRUD operations.
The back end sported a speedy and feature-rich SilkJS server connected to a MySQL database. The Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) implementation allows database tables to be defined as JavaScript objects. Extraneous JavaScript members in the field definitions for a Schema (table) are ignored by the ORM. This allows the programmer to associate more “interesting” information about the field that SQL syntax does not allow. When you edit the Schema definitions, the ORM automatically manages the queries to the database to alter the tables there accordingly.
Project Goals
A key goal of this project was to demonstrate the use of the DreamFactory API, exercise that API as it was being developed, and provide a working example application for developers to learn the DreamFactory platform. The application had to be sufficiently sophisticated to demonstrate that front end developers can develop complex client-server applications using the platform. And the entire application needed to be served on the back end by the DreamFactory Services Platform.
The scope of the application was extended quite a bit to include the creation of contact groups and the organization of contacts into one or more of these groups. The focus of the project would be on the mobile implementations, including a new tablet implementation. The features of the desktop administrative application were enhanced minimally to facilitate the mobile implementations. The mobile implementations were enhanced to become fully functioning contact list management applications with the ability to create, edit, delete groups, contacts, and contact information.
Conclusion
The project was a resounding success! The significant update to RoloDeux using DreamFactory yielded minimum refactoring and maximum benefit on both back and front end to create a new and exciting product.
The full case study describes the process of porting the application, the DSP platform, and the resulting application. You can fork the source code to the Address Book application from GitHub. Developers may peruse the repository, check out the code, and modify it. It is licensed under the MIT License. Enjoy!