Monthly Archives: September 2015

Quick Tangent: The Heartbreak of VDKs

Game Design, Quick Tangent

As I proposed in an earlier post, it would be cool to transform one’s home into an haunted house. However, given that it would be a rather tiresome chore to implement all of it from scratch, I wasn’t seriously thinking about committing to such an endeavor…until someone pointed a possible replacement for all of the hardware and software regarding the sensors: the Tile App product product. Hmmmm…that would be a cool idea, if they happened to have a SDK available for it. “They wouldn’t…wait a minute…they’ve been talking about an available SDK since 2014?” Excited, I looked for this promised SDK on their site…but to no avail: my dream of a SDK turned out to be a real VDK (i.e., vaporware development kit). Hopefully, my broken developer heart will one day bloom again with the sight of such a shiny, new SDK…but based on past experience, I’m not holding my breath.

Metadata-Driven Design: Building Web APIs for Dynamic Mobile Apps

GitHub, InfoQ, Metadata-Driven Design

In my third professional article, I change position from my last one regarding an intelligent API client, now focusing on creating an intelligent API server. In the article, I describe how metadata-driven design can be used to create an intelligent Web API server that (with the help of some ideas from HATEOAS) then enables a mobile app to become truly dynamic. Once again, I must give many thanks to the staff at InfoQ and Ralph Winzinger for taking the time to help with this submission. If you have any interest or stake in mobile apps or Web APIs in an enterprise environment, there’s a good chance that you’ll find something of value in it. Go check it out!

There’s also a sample C# project on GitHub that serves as a working example of the MDD Web API server described in the article. You can find it here.

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Metadata-Driven Design: Building Web APIs for Dynamic Mobile Apps
In this InfoQ article about a metadata-driven Web API server, Aaron Kendall uses this approach in order to show how one can create a mobile application that can evolve during runtime.