Azure and Android

I this evening saw Ryan Joy present on "Azure Mobile Services For Android Developers" which I am going to consider part of the South by Southwest activities given how Ryan advertises it here. This means I did something for SXSW this year for a change. The event was technically at some regularly occurring event (an Android user group) at Capital Factory which is a business which sits at the 16th Floor of the Omni hotel in Austin, Texas in the downtown. Casey Watson mentioned data storage at Azure in his talk and Ryan Joy suggested that one may push and pull from tables, blobs, and queues. If you push to an Azure queue from an app you could use a worker role on the Azure side to audit it for changes and then react. Ryan suggests one may wish to use an OAuth-style service as that of Facebook, Twitter, Google, or GitHub (no turnkey authentication yet for GitHub, it will take some craftsmanship for authentication credentials keeping) and then use the token for your identifier at tables/blobs/queues at Azure! This is a good way to manage logging in and user data. Restful APIs allow you to do everything in Azure. SDKs for Android and iOS use Node.js to speak to the API like so:

mssql.query('select top 1 * from foo',
   {success: function(results) {
      console.log(results);
   }
);

 
 

You don't need the Node.js stuff if you are just interfacing with Azure via JavaScript in a plain jane web site. It is a solution in the mobile tie-ins. Our city is bustling downtown for SXSW. Most of the interactive stuff ended yesterday and I think music and film is next up. I normally crave the regular free geek talks that happen about Austin more so than this annual event, but whatever. I guess tonight's thing straddled the line between the two. The view here is from the roof of the Omni.