Sencha has boldly stated its "first" to market status with Sencha.io, the "first" mobile HTML5 cloud to be delivered to date. Announced in a low-key blog on the company's website last month, Sencha has pledged its allegiance to the developer cause with a promise of "shared experiences that run in the browser", but without worrying about writing server code or dealing with hosting.
Justifying its existence (as indeed it should), Sencha insists that web developers have been looking for a way to integrate multi-user and multi-device functionality into their apps, but that writing in all that functionality from scratch is a major task. The answer, according to Sencha, is to provide all the APIs needed for users to log in to an app and interact with the app and each other. Sencha.io's major selling point is that it handles all the tricky synchronization and data management in the cloud, so that developers can focus on core app functionality.
Using the Sencha.io service and the SDK, application developers write their applications entirely in JavaScript and Sencha.io utilizes cloud services as necessary. In other words, developers can simply write a client-side Sencha Touch application and use the power of the cloud to make their app come alive, or so the theory goes.
According to the company blog, "The Sencha.io platform provides a set of cloud services that make it easier for mobile web app developers to deliver robust web functionality to users. Sencha.io is an entirely new way for the client developer to think about the cloud. To store data, you simply tell your model to store data. And it does the rest. If you need to send messages to other users, you enable messaging with just one line of code. If you need to listen for messages, just set up a callback.
Sencha.io has been launched with four key supporting service streams: Data, Messages, Login, and Deployment. At the time of launch the company is also providing documentation, including API documentation covering the "how factor" when integrating the Sencha.io SDK into an application — as well as guides on all the services that are available at the Sencha Documentation Center. The company says that it will now add more features and "polish" as it goes through and progresses the beta.
