“Cloud content services” is a relatively new term, meant to define how things like documents, videos, slideshows and more can be rendered to give the same experience to users regardless of the device from which they access that content.
Brightcove, which makes the App Cloud content application platform, recently extended the platform with these services that access an organization’s content repository, grab and cache assets, and then optimize them for specific devices.
Application developers “can pull in content in any XML, JSON or RSS-based format, compress it, and remove the unnecessary stuff for delivery,” said Phil Costa, director of product management for App Cloud. “These are [high-resolution] images, and on a phone, that’s a lot of data to transfer and memory-taxing.” Before deployment, the software transcodes the images for the appropriate form factor.
Brightcove also recently introduced a plug-in model for the App Cloud platform, essentially enabling Web developers to become mobile application developers by providing containers that deploy HTML5- and JavaScript-based applications as native on a device. “It’s a hybrid native architecture,” Costa explained. “The application is deployed in a native container to integrate with the phone services and present a great user experience without [developers] having to learn the specifics of each platform.”
The plug-in model allows developers to extend the containers with their own custom code to leverage such device services as GPS, camera and vibration, Costa said, while still having the advantage of what is primarily a Web environment.
In the recent release, which came out in mid-November, the company also expanded its push notification service in the platform, according to Costa, by increasing the amount of message targeting that can be done. For instance, sports notifications can go only to those who express an interest in sports. Also, targeting can be done programmatically, such as by creating and executing a user alert every time there’s a change to an account, he said.
“This is a real opportunity allowing Web developers to create mobile applications using their skills,” Costa said. “The workflow and process are familiar, so productivity advances.”
