Appcelerator has launched the latest version of its Titanium platform, including access to its Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS), a suite of ready-to-use cloud tools that allow developers to integrate and deploy cloud-connected apps more easily.
Supporting Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5 technologies, Titanium 2.0 offers mobile devs the ability to integrate 15 cloud different options like push notifications, authentication, photo sharing and ratings systems, without having to write server code.
Tasks that usually require costly server programming or tedious integration with multiple SDKs are performed through one simple interface, said the firm, which hosts its cloud infrastructure through Amazon Web Services.
Developers simply pick which APIs to use and Appcelerator takes care of deploying and maintaining a full server stack that includes a database, search engine, file storage, and application logic.
Titanium 2.0 and ACS are both available for download and use for free with Appcelerator’s “App EXPLORE” package, which includes 1.2m push notifications and emails, quarter of a million tier one and two API calls and 5GB of storage. Additional storage, notifications and API calls will be charged.
Appcelerator’s cloud services:
- User management: provide access, authentication and cross-platform controls.
- Photos: store, share, and publish photos from within the app.
- Photo collections: store, share, and publish photo albums from within the app.
- Places (rich location storage): harness location to provide better search results and pointed ads, for example, without setting up GIS or a latitude/longitude server.
- Social integration: enable customer login and authentication using Facebook and Twitter.
- Custom data objects: create and analyze data derived from searchable fields, such as location or interactions with other users to optimize app features and offers.
- Push notifications: push messages to customers and employees regardless of device and whether or not the application is running.
- Check-ins: enable check-ins from within any app.
- Status updates: make apps more social by enabling users to post status updates from wherever they are.
- Chat: embed IM within apps to allow multiple user and user group threads.
- Ratings and reviews: add ratings, reviews and “likes” to apps without having to build an entire rating machine and server-side infrastructure.
- Discussion forums: provide users the ability to post updates, reviews or other content and allow others to respond.
- Messaging and email templates: plug-in pre-built messaging and email templates.
- Client identification: cloud-connected apps help developers identify the classes of devices people are using to access apps, providing insight into how to better optimize content.
- Key values: simple, unstructured storage for any kind of content.
