

Azure Mobile Services launched: A Cloud Backend For Mobile Apps - friism
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/28/microsoft-launches-windows-azure-mobile-services-a-cloud-backend-for-windows-8-apps-ios-android-windows-phone-support-planned/

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facorreia
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.

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sv123
Interesting that it has a SQL backend, I wonder what they are using as an ORM
to enable querying in the collections.

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wluu
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...](http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/08/28/announcing-
windows-azure-mobile-services.aspx)) 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").

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vyrotek
_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.

~~~
facorreia
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.

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danko
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.

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anandkulkarni
So it's Parse, but pushed by Microsoft?

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

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deepGem
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.

~~~
ludicast
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.

