For up-to-date product documentation, see the IBM MobileFirst Foundation Developer Center.
What's new in deploying and managing apps
IBM MobileFirst™ Platform FoundationV8.0.0 comes with capabilities to help you deploy and manage your apps. We can now update your apps and adapters without restarting MobileFirst Server.
Improved DevOps support
MobileFirst Server has been significantly redesigned to better support your DevOps environment. MobileFirst Server is installed once into the application server environment, and no changes to the application server configuration are required when you upload an application or change the MobileFirst Server configuration.
You do not need to restart MobileFirst Server when you update your apps or any adapters that your apps depend on. We can perform configuration operations, or upload a new version of an adapter or register a new application while the server is still handling traffic.
Configuration changes and development operations are protected by security roles. For details, see Configure user authentication for MobileFirst Server administration.
We can upload development artifacts to the server in various ways to give you more operational flexibility:
- MobileFirst Operations Console is enhanced: In particular, we can now use it to register an application or a new version of an application, to manage app security parameters, and to deploy certificates, create push notification tags, and send push notifications. The console now also includes contextual help guides. For details, see MobileFirst Operations Console overview.
- Command-line tool
- For details, see Administering MobileFirst applications through the command line.
- REST API calls: For details, see REST API for the MobileFirst Server administration service.
Development artifacts that you upload to the server include adapters and their configuration, security configurations for our apps, push notification certificates, and log filters.
For more information about the new MobileFirst Server design, see Deploy MobileFirst applications to test and production environments and Development concepts and overview.
Run applications that were created on IBM Bluemix on IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation
Developers can migrate IBM® Bluemix applications to run on IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation. Migration requires that you make configuration changes to our client application to match IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation APIs.
IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation as a service on IBM Bluemix
We can now use the IBM Mobile Foundation for Bluemix® service on IBM Bluemix to create and run your enterprise mobile apps. For more information, see Deploy the MobileFirst Server to the cloud.
No .wlapp files
In previous versions, applications were deployed to MobileFirst Server by uploading a .wlapp file. The file contained data that described the application and, in the case of hybrid applications, the required web resources also. In V8.0.0, instead of the .wlapp file:
- You register an app in MobileFirst Server by deploying an application descriptor JSON file. For more information, see Develop applications.
- To update Cordova applications by using Direct Update, you upload an archive (.zip file) of the modified web resource to the server. The archive file no longer contains the web preview files or skins that were possible in previous versions of IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation. These have been discontinued. The archive contains only the web resources sent to the clients, as well as checksums for Direct Update validations. For more information, see Update Cordova client apps directly.
To enable Direct Update of client Cordova apps that are installed on end-user devices, we must now deploy the modified web resources as an archive (.zip file) to the server. To enable secure Direct Update, a user-defined keystore file must be deployed in MobileFirst Server and a copy of the matching public key must be included in the deployed client application. For more information about Direct Update, see Update Cordova client apps directly.
Adapters
- Adapters are Apache Maven projects
- Starting from V8.0.0, MobileFirst adapters are treated as Maven projects. We can create, build, and deploy adapters by using standard command-line Maven commands or using any IDE that supports Maven, such as Eclipse and IntelliJ. For more information, see Adapters as Apache Maven projects.
- Adapter configuration and deployment in DevOps environments
- Starting with V8.0.0 of MobileFirst Server, administrators can use the MobileFirst Operations Console to modify the behavior of an adapter that has been deployed. After reconfiguration, the changes take effect in the server immediately, without the need to redeploy the adapter, or restart the server. For more information see Configure adapters.
- Starting with V8.0.0, we can "hot deploy" adapters, meaning deploy, undeploy, and redeploy them at run time, while MobileFirst Server is still serving traffic.
- Changes in the adapter descriptor file
- The adapter.xml descriptor file for V8.0.0 has changed slightly.
- For more information on the structure of the adapter descriptor file for Java™ adapters, see The Java adapter-descriptor file.
- For more information on the structure of the adapter descriptor file for JavaScript adapters, see The JavaScript adapter-descriptor file.
- Integration with Swagger UI
- Starting from V8.0.0, MobileFirst Server integrates with Swagger UI. For any adapter, we can view the associated API by clicking View Swagger Docs in the Resources tab in the MobileFirst Operations Console. The feature is available in development environments only.
- Support for JavaScript adapters
- V8.0.0 supports JavaScript adapters with HTTP and SQL connectivity types, only.
- Support for JAX-RS 2.0
- JAX-RS 2.0 introduces new server-side functionality: server-side asynchronous HTTP, filters and interceptors. MobileFirst adapters can now exploit these new features. For more information see Implementing the JAX-RS service of the adapter.
IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation on IBM Containers
IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation on IBM Containers released for V8.0.0 is available on the IBM Passport Advantage® site. This version of IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation on IBM Containers is production ready and supports enterprise dashDB™ transactional database on IBM Bluemix.
Note: See the prerequisites for deploying IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation on IBM Containers .
Learn more about Deploy to the cloud in an IBM Container.
Deploy MobileFirst Server V8.0.0 on IBM PureApplication System
We can now deploy and configure MobileFirst Server V8.0.0 to the supported IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation System Pattern on IBM PureApplication® System.
All supported IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation System Pattern now include support for an existing IBM DB2® database.
IBM MobileFirst Platform Application Center is now supported on a Virtual System Pattern.
Learn more about Deploy MobileFirst Server on IBM PureApplication System.
Parent topic: What's new in V8.0.0