Today we’re very excited to announce the beta availability of Sencha.io, the first cloud built for the mobile web developer. Sencha.io makes it easy for you to build applications that deliver shared experiences.
The Sencha.io platform provides a set of cloud services that make it easier for mobile web app developers to deliver robust web functionality to users. Your mobile apps goes well beyond just the client itself and your apps need to be able to create, store, and share data and messages with the app’s users.
Imagine you need to build an expense reporting application for your company using Sencha Touch. Typically you’d need a place to store your data, a way to route approvals, a way to have your users log in. You’d pick databases and build business logic, and write thousands of lines of server code along the way. With Sencha.io, with only a few lines of JavaScript code–running just in the browser–you can power this entire experience.
Sencha.io is an entirely new way for the client developer to think about the cloud. To store data, you simply tell your model to store data. And it does the rest. If you need to send messages to other users, you enable messaging with just one line of code. If you need to listen for messages, just set up a callback. And Sencha.io does the rest. If you need to log users in from Facebook, you just request the login with an API, and Sencha.io automates the whole process. And if you need a place to deploy your application, Sencha.io provides that, too.
Today we’re launching the beta with four services: Data, Messages, Login, and Deployment.
h3. Sencha.io Data
Data is the heart of many applications–you users need to store data and share it on all their devices. They also want to share that data with their friends. Sencha.io Data makes it easy to for apps to store data in the cloud and access it any time. It’s a synchronized store that lets you write data to any device, seamlessly merge conflicts, and keep working when the network isn’t available–a necessity with mobile considering the unreliability of the network. As a Sencha Touch developer, all you need to do to get started using Data is change the proxy in your app, and automatically your data store synchs with the cloud.
h3. Sencha.io Messages
Structured data is the right solution for storing and sharing “row” based data, but there are so many times when rows and columns aren’t the right solution. Messages lets an app send one-to-one and one-to-many messages to tell other users that something has changed. Messages lets you send small JSON objects to users and to devices, stores them, and makes them available on callbacks for pickup. If you want to listen for messages, just register a callback in your app and it starts picking them up.
h3. Sencha.io Login
All apps need user data, and Login makes it easy for an app to provide registration and login functionality, enable users to have accounts, and soon, to bring in users from Facebook and Twitter. Using Sencha.io Login, your application can be set to require a login when a user visits your URL or after the user has already downloaded or started using your app. It’s up to you. Then store the user data in the cloud so it’s available on any device the user logs in to.
h3. Sencha.io Deployment
The deployment service makes it easy for you to deploy your client application, and gives you a place to manage your app and the services it’s using. Sencha.io’s domain for app deployment is “senchafy.com”. Sencha.io also provides a developer console you use to upload apps, perform version management, and push apps to the production environment or a development environment (“senchafy-dev.com”). You can also manage your team, manage your user groups, and see the Sencha.io system status.
h3. Getting Started
Full documentation, including API documentation for how to integrate the Sencha.io SDK into your application, and guides on all the services are available at the “Sencha Documentation Center”:http://docs.sencha.com/io/1-0/.
Of course, we’ll be adding features and adding polish as we go through the beta. We’ve set up a forum for you to share your feedback and your questions with us, and we’ll be communicating our plans there and on the Sencha blog. We’re excited to have you try Sencha.io and to see what kind of apps you’ll build with it.
So head on over to “http://developer.sencha.io”:http://developer.sencha.io, create a team, and download the SDK. If you have a Sencha ID (from our Forums, or Designer or Animator) you’re already registered. Login, and get started!
P.S. if you had been using Sync before, your application will continue to work. Sync has become a part of Data. If you’ve been using Src before, again, your application will continue to work as it’s become a part of the Deployment service. They both continue to work as-is.
Great!
but broken link in the penult paragraph
One small correction. Sencha.io touts itself as “the first mobile HTML5 cloud”. Unfortunately, this is not true. The Strobe Platform was announced and made available as beta in September. Sencha.io’s feature set is almost identical.
@monitoringe — thanks, fixed the link.
Sounds awesome. Just wonder about pricing…
@Phillip Same here. Why invest the time and effort building on a platform that might be pulled out from under your feet the moment it exits beta?
@Peter, I’ve been using the beta for Sencha.io since before September. What year are you referring to?
@AwesomeBob, I’m going by the post which says “Today we’re very excited to announce the beta availability of Sencha.io”. Today is October 24, 2011, not September. The post made no mention of earlier availability.
So you assumed that this is the actual first release? Okay that makes sense then.
Check this out:
https://staging.sencha.com/blog/announcing-the-senchacon-2011-app-contest/
August 5th. Congratulations on being a proponent for your own software though.
This is awesome! Any word on future costs for this?
Is data stored through Amazon Relational Database Service?
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but I not want an app that runs *just* in the browser; for instance, I would appreciate being able to upload a ‘trusted’ version of my models with associated validations to Sencha.io data so the said validations are performed server-side. Relying on the client only would be foolish… Or am I missing something?
Thanks for the message service, though, I will try that out quite soon.
Cheers
Will Sencha IO work for ExtJS apps? If not, will it be working for ExtJS apps in the near future or is it only for Sencha Touch apps?
To continue on my previous post.
Eg. How can I send a message from a Touch device to my ExtJS web app and vice versa?
Could Coffeescript be used when using the IO deployment service?
All my code is in Coffeescript.
Sencha.io will work for Ext JS apps at some point in the future, but we don’t have a specific release identified for it just yet.
@Romain – Performing model validation on the server-side sounds interesting. Can you describe why an application would require this?
@Noah – For you, as a Coffeescript developer, to make use of the the deployment service, you would have to compile your code into Javascript before uploading the package. Are you building Sencha Touch apps with Coffeescript?
@John Merrells: Yes I am. It’s working great with ExtJS and has been working great on Touch too. I wish that the documentation, Sencha Designer, IO deployment and all other services would have out of the box support for coffeescript in the future so one can just copy+paste from the documentation, upload coffeescript directly and have generated coffeescript code etc.
Copy-pasting coffeescript. Isn’t that the summit of laziness…
Will google, live id and yahoo login be added to the list?
In that way we don’t have to use janrain for them.
What about full text search support for the data that is saved in the cloud?
Being able to save the data is just half the story. One has to be able to retrieve the data too through a full text search. Right now we are using ElasticSearch. I doubt that IO could replace that kind of search engine.
Correct me if I am wrong.
@Noah regarding ‘google and yahoo authentication’ – there’s a long list of third party authentication services that we could integrate with. We’ll determine which to tackle first based on feedback from the community. So, that’s a +1 for google and yahoo from you.
@Noah regarding ‘full text search’ – We do support this for the User and Device objects, since the query for them is always sent to the server. We do not support this for the Sync Data Store, since the query is always processed locally in the client, even if the client is online. So, the question is perhaps better posed as ‘why doesn’t local storage do this?’
@John Merrells: When can we expect Facebook and Twitter login? And when will the others start to be implemented?
Then it seems that I still have to use ElasticSearch since I cannot store all my app’s threads in a local db. It’s kinda the issue that you can’t store google’s all websites in a local db, you have to have a way to do a full text search in the server and send the results (json objects) to the client. Is this correct?
@Noah – We should take this conversation to email. Mail me merrells@sencha.com
Thank you for sharing your opinion here. I really respect it.
This is awesome !
Oh, this is so cool. I think this will change the internet a lot.
This is awesome,thank you very much for sharing