Cloud-connected mobile applications [Building Mobile Applications]

Zend Studio now offers a CCM tool enabling developers to build native mobile applications using the cloud platform. CCM supports development of RPC-based or REST-based web services for the cloud using Zend Framework 2 and Zend Server Gateway.

CCM also offers support for developing native mobile applications by integrating with various mobile SDKs (Android SDK/ADT for Android, Xcode for iOS, and Windows Phone SDK for Windows Phone). This enables developersto build and test the applications in native environments/devices.

CCM tool also offers a simple and easy-to-use mobile GUI editor which helps developers to effortlessly build great user interfaces for their mobile applications.

Zend Studio 10

As a first step towards building your mobile application, please ensure that you install Zend Studio 10 on your development machine. Zend Studio 10 offers integrated support for building cloud-connected mobile applications and allows developers to deploy their mobile application on the cloud.

Zend Studio 10 is available for purchase from the Zend Online Store; there is a free

30-day trial as well. For further information visit http://www.zend.com/en/products/

studio/.

phpCloud

Zend Developer Cloud is a cloud-based PHP development environment, which enables developers to build and deploy applications on the cloud, without undergoing the hassle of setting up a PHP development environment, and configuring and maintaining the environment.

This environment has Zend Framework 2 installed with a large set of PHP extensions; developers can make use of various development tools such as Zend Studio, Eclipse PDT,

and CLI to build and deploy their applications on the developer cloud. Zend Developer Cloud also provides capabilities to push your application to other external cloud services such as Amazon and IBM SmartCloud.

Zend Developer Cloud is currently in free developer beta. For further information about Zend Developer Cloud, please refer to their website: http://www.phpcloud.com/.

In this task we will set up our phpCloud account and configure the cloud environment in Zend Studio 10 using the following steps:

1.       Visit https://my.phpcloud.com/user/login, register for a new account, and log in to your phpCloud account.

2.       After the login, you will be asked to create a container. You can specify a container name which will be a part of the container URL; you can also choose to generate a SSH key pair or use your own SSH keys; in this case,we will generate a new SSH key pair. The following screenshot describes the container creation screen:

3.       Now download the SSH keys; we will be using these keys to set up our deployment target in Zend Studio:

       4.       In Zend Studio, navigate to Window | Show View | Targets:

      5.       Click on the Add Target icon and choose phpcloud as shown in the following screenshot:

6.       On the phpcloud Target Details page, you will be asked to provide the following details:

‰        Username: Used to specify your Zend Developer Cloud username

‰        Password: Used to specify your Zend Developer Cloud password

‰        SSH Private Key: Used to point to the SSH key that was just generated in the phpcloud container creation screen

7.       After you click on Finish, you will see that the new target is added to the list of targets:

What just happened?

We have successfully created our first mobile application using Zend's cloud-connected mobile application projects. In the subsequent sections we will understand how to extend these web services using Zend Framework 2 to build additional functionality into mobile applications.