Azure Mobile Services launched: A Cloud Backend For Mobile Apps | Hacker News Reader

Azure Mobile Services launched: A Cloud Backend For Mobile Apps

techcrunch.com

38 pointsfriism11 comments

Looks interesting. It provides a RESTful service running on a managed, scalable node.js instance providing a CRUD interface over a SQL Database. You can set access levels and customize the service through JavaScript scripts. They apparently run in a sandboxed or restricted environment.

Interesting that it has a SQL backend, I wonder what they are using as an ORM to enable querying in the collections.

We use node-sqlserver (https://github.com/WindowsAzure/node-sqlserver).

We also give scripts full access to the node-sqlserver driver, so they can run their own arbitrary SQL as necessary.

You'd probably assume if any, they'd be using the Entity Framework.

Anyway, looking at the comments in Scott Guthrie's blogpost (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/08/28/announcing...) he also mentioned that they "will also support unstructured storage in the future so if you don't need rich querying you can use that too."

Also, from the comments he mentions they'll be publishing documentation for the REST API soon'ish (as well as "pre-built REST helper methods for Win8/iOS/Android/others").

We will also support unstructured storage in the future so if you don't need rich querying you can use that too.

I got excited for a moment. I've been using Azure for a few years now and I was thinking that this could have been a hint of them offering something more similar to MongoDB in the future. But, then it hit me that he's probably only talking about the Table Storage (Now called Table Service?) which I will never touch again.

Table Storage could be much more useful if it had indexes. A managed, reliable MongoDB hosted service would be very interesting.

With that said, SQL Database (formerly known as SQL Azure), specially with the Federations feature, is an interesting option for LOB applications.

This is the sort of thing that makes me fear for the Parses, Kinveys, and StackMobs of the world. Today it's Azure -- how many tomorrows is it going to be before it's Amazon or Rackspace?

Once the major cloud hosting players are in on the easy cloud-backed key-value store field, how much oxygen is there in the room for players like Parse? Especially when they themselves are built on EC2? I've got to think we're no more than 6-12 months from seeing that happen, and then they're going to have a tremendous fight on their hands, venture funding or not.

So it's Parse, but pushed by Microsoft?

When they have an entire cloud service structure behind them, that's no small thing.

Well this is stiff competition for Parse and the like. However, Parse still has seamless ways to query location data. Not sure if I'll be able to do that with this Azure backend.

I'd be shocked if they can't add that in in < 100 lines of c# or whatever they use.

If Microsoft continues learn from their mistakes they will be very scary. Scary in a good way for once.

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