This shows architecture and how to create Mobile Apps on Mobile Cloud Service (MSC):

• Use the different APIs available with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) to integrate your mobile applications with MCS back-end services
• Create users and roles and secure channels using MCS
• Use MCS to handle offline synchronization
• Create and test storage APIs
• Send and receive notifications with MCS
• Use SOAP and RESTful connectors to connect to existing web services
• Design and implement custom APIs by using the MCS API designer
• Use MCS Analytics to monitor and manage existing back-end services
• Test, debug, and monitor MCS back-end services using the integrated logging and diagnostic capabilities
• Create locations, assets, and beacons with location services
• Integrate MCS with Process Cloud Services

Log in to your Mobile Cloud Service Home page as you did in the previous practice: Log into the Cloud Services Dashboard, select Mobile Cloud Environment, select the link for the Mobile Cloud Service Instance and you will be on the MCS Home page.
2. In the upper left of the page, click the Options icon (commonly referred to as the “hamburger” icon) to access the Home menu.
3. From the Home menu, select the Applications option to view the main applications page. Click the arrow in the upper left to close the menu.
4. Click the Mobile Backends icon.
5. Here, you can create, search, and view any mobile backend. On the left, you see any previously created mobile backend definitions. On the right, you see some high-level details for the selected mobile backend. In the upper left, click the New Mobile Backend button.

• Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) is built around the concept of mobile backends, which enable you, as a mobile app developer, to develop and deploy groupings of APIs that are designed to support a specific set of mobile apps. You can then associate one or more apps with the mobile backend to access those APIs.In MCS, platform APIs such as push notifications and custom APIs written in Node.js are made available to specific mobile applications by publishing them through one or more MCS Mobile Backend. From the mobile developers perspective, this allows them to consume these APIs without having to give undue consideration to how they are implemented in MCS.A mobile backend is a secure grouping of APIs and other resources for a set of mobile apps.
  1.Create the mobile backend. 2.Create the realm. 3.Create and configure APIs. 4.Register the app. 5.Install and code with SDK. 6.Test and fix. 7.Publish and deploy.
• MCS has two sets of APIs that can be published to the outside world through the MCS mobile backends: custom APIs and platform APIs. Custom APIs coded in Node.js give you the flexibility and freedom to build practically whatever services you want for your mobile applications. Using Node.js, you can expose, shape, and tailor any of your existing enterprise system services specifically optimized for your mobile applications to consume.

In contrast, platform APIs are a set of built-in APIs provided by MCS to give your mobile team a boost by providing common services and APIs typically required by mobile applications, such as push notifications, data synchronization, storage, and analytics. It’s these platform APIs that specifically make MCS valuable to mobile teams— these are a key value proposition for MCS, saving your teams from having to write, test, and maintain this code themselves.

This SDK makes calling the MCS REST services easier because it removes the need to write a large amount of code to call the REST services, instead replacing this code with SDK calls in the mobile’s native language, such as Objective C for iOS and Java for Android, in typically nothing more than one or two or three lines of code.

• As a mobile app developer, you can use Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) Mobile User Management APIs to access details about the logged-in user. You control mobile user access to apps and resources using realms and roles. Mobile users are created within a realm and assigned roles to grant access permissions. A realm is a container for managing a set of users in an environment.
• MCS provides the Sync Client SDK and its supporting Data Offline API for caching MCS custom and REST resources in an efficient, uniform and transparent way. The Sync Client SDK, along with the Storage SDK, also provides support for caching storage objects. When developing client apps, you, as a mobile app developer, might often take these goals into consideration:
• Enable updates to app data on mobile devices when connectivity is intermittent or non-existent.
• Improve performance by minimizing the amount of calls and data transported over the wire.

MCS data offline features and the Sync Client SDK, with its data caching, support for offline operations, and automated synchronization, enable you to achieve these goals when you access custom API resources through the Sync Client SDK and storage objects through the Storage SDK. In addition, through declarative policies, you can design caching and synchronization policies for your custom APIs that apply across your apps, and can be adjusted without having to modify code.

• Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) provides a Storage API for storing media in the cloud. As a mobile app developer, you can use this API in your mobile app to store and retrieve objects, such as files, text, images, and JSON objects.
• Most mobile applications need to connect to back-end resources. Typically, this connection is established through SOAP or REST web services. Rather than coding calls to each individual web service in your custom APIs, you can simplify your job and be more productive by using MCS’ Connector APIs. In MCS, a Connector API is a special type of API that you do not code, but rather configure. It represents a connection to an external system for which you define a list of possible interactions. You create Connector APIs by using the MCS user interface, and consume them as any other platform API in your own custom API implementations.MCS does not mandate the use of Connector APIs. If you bypass them, you will have to write more code in your custom APIs however, and will miss on several other benefits.

The runtime behavior of the REST and JSON end-to-end.
1.The Custom API sends a request to the REST Connector API.
2.The Connector API retrieves the remote URL, applies rules and the security policy. The JSON payload is passed through untouched.
3.The connector sends the request to the external service.
4.The service sends a JSON response back to the connector.
5.The connector sends the JSON response to the Custom API.

The Oracle MCS architecture for native SDK is always the same and not dependent on the programming language. SDKs exist for Apple, Android, and Xamarin. The beginning of each use of an SDK is to define a configuration for the mobile backend you want to access in MCS. The configuration is XML or a property list for Apple, Android and Xamarin. With the configuration in place, developers now address the Mobile Backend Manager (MBE Manager) object to obtain a handle to a Mobile Backend client instance (MBE instance).

The MBE exposes service proxy objects, that each represent a functional area of the client platform API. For example, the service proxy for Storage exposes native APIs for querying the MBE for available collections, getting information about a single collection, reading the collection object metadata, uploading, downloading, deleting object content and to create new one.

The analytics platform API in MCS allows mobile developers to raise certain events that need to be reported using the MCS UI. The analytics API is backed by a reporting dashboard in the MCS UI allowing you to visualize the events without having to troll through hundreds of lines of logs. With MCS Analytics, you can analyze adoption trends. Know who is using your mobile applications. Are your mobile applications gaining or losing users? Which mobile applications are used most and how long are users staying connected? You can gain a better understanding of your users. How are they using your mobile applications? Are they searching your knowledge base? What operating systems and devices are they using? You can create funnels to analyze user work flows specific to your business. Are there particular issues that block users from completing a work flow? Are there too many work orders on hold because technicians don’t have the right parts? Or maybe technicians can’t complete their work orders on time because customers aren’t at home. So, as you can see, with MCS Analytics, you get a rich set of reports that give you a comprehensive view of your mobile program or applications.  Now that you’ve seen what’s possible, let’s look at how MCS gets the data for these charts.