[aerogear-dev] LiveOak SDK

[Matt Wringe]

Initial email to get some discussion going around the LiveOak SDK and 
AeroGear collaboration.

Essentially in LiveOak we are going to need a few different SDK types

- Client Application SDK
This is the code which will run on the users device. Initial targets 
here are javascript (+ cordova support), iOS, Android. This type of SDK 
will handle things like getting and sending resources to and from the 
server, handling login/logout/registration, etc. Probably some other 
things like device registration would be needed as well.

Not sure if we want to provide support for some other things outside of 
communicating with the server or not (eg access to device components (eg 
camera, location, etc)) or if these would be best handled by using the 
native environment's SDK instead.

- Server Side SDK
This is code that runs on the server side, written in JavaScript by the 
application developer. This will need to be familiar to the client 
application's JavaScript SDK, but may not be exactly the same. This type 
of SDK will be able to access the same resources as the client side 
JavaScript, as well as other internal resources and libraries.


I am not sure how to collaborate between the LiveOak and AeroGear teams 
here. AeroGear makes really awesome SDKs for various mobile platforms, 
but with LiveOak we are dealing with a specific type of application. The 
AeroGear SDKs tend to handle the more generic case, which I don't 
necessarily think makes sense for a LiveOak SDK.

I do think it makes sense that the LiveOak SDK uses the AeroGear SDK 
internally, but I don't know if we want to expose these AeroGear 
components to a LiveOak developer or not.


For me, I envision something like the admin setting up their application 
in the LiveOak console which then generates a json configuration file 
(url locations, resources available, KeyCloak settings, UPS settings, 
etc). The application developer then drops this json file in to their 
application, the LiveOak SDK reads the json file to set it self up and 
then its really easy for the developer to start using it.

[there are also some really cool things we could be doing here as well 
if we can get awesome data sync support for AeroGear. It might be 
interesting to be able to fetch a resource from the server and 
automatically sync its state across between the client and server. This 
way the object appears as a local object: if the resource changes on the 
server, it changes locally as well, if it changes locally, that change 
is pushed to the server. This way you are just dealing with an object, 
and not having to fetch and then push object back and forth between the 
server manually]

Anyone have any thoughts on this?