- Amplify Libraries: Open-source libraries and UI components to add cloud-powered functionality
- Amplify: An interactive toolchain that creates and manages a back-end to apps.
- Amplify Console is an AWS service that hosts full-stack, serverless web applications
AWS stated in a May 27 blog that Amplify iOS and Amplify Android included libraries and tools (CLI Toolchain and IDE Helpers) that allow mobile developers to create secure, scalable cloud-powered apps. The libraries can be used with backends created with the Amplify API or with existing AWS backends. This is the best way to create native mobile apps powered by AWS services. AWS Amplify Demo (source: AWS). The new iOS and Android offerings provide:
- Amplify CLI – Configure all services required to power your backend via a simple command line interface
- Amplify iOS Libraries & Android Libraries: Use case-centric library to integrate app code with a backend via declarative interfaces
- Amplify UI components: – UI libraries to support React, React Native and Angular as well as Ionic, Ionic, and Vue
“Before today, you used a combination of tools, SDKs: The Amplify CLI to create your backend and one or more AWS Mobile SDKs for accessing it,” wrote Sebastien Stormacq, AWS’s Sebastien Stormacq. AWS Mobile SDKs are basically low-level wrappers for the AWS Services APIs. You will need to be able to understand the API details, and to write many lines undifferentiated code such as error handling, object (de)serialization, etc. Stormacq stated that this process can be simplified by following:
- Native libraries are designed around specific use-cases such as authentication, data storage and access, and machine learning predictions.
- A declarative interface that allows developers to programmatically implement best practices using abstractions
Stormacq stated that thinking in terms of use cases rather than AWS Services leads to higher-level abstraction, faster development cycles and fewer lines code. They also provide tools that can be integrated with your native IDE toolchain, such as XCode for iOS or Gradle for Android. Developers can use the new service for free. They need only pay for any back-end services that are used by their application above the free tier. You can find the respective Android and iOS offerings at the CocoaPods code repositories. Source code for the project is available at GitHub.