Microsoft Research Mobile Backend as a Service: Introducing Project Hawaii
Microsoft Research(MS Research) is an infinite source
of technical innovation. Because of my academic
background, I am constantly following the new MS
Research projects and drawing ideas and inspiration from
them. Recently, I came across Project Hawaii (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hawaii/
) which provides a set of mobile services hosted in
Windows Azure for computational and data storage. Sounds
familiar? Yes, Project Hawaii
overlaps slightly with Windows Azure Mobile Services but
it focuses on new and innovative service capabilities.
In this first release, Project Hawaii
enables the following capabilities:
·
The Key-Value service enables a mobile application to
store application-wide state information in the cloud.
·
The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Service returns
the text that appears in a photographic image. For
example, given an image of a road sign, the service
returns the text of the sign.
·
The Path Prediction Service predicts a destination based
on a sequence of current locations and historical
data.
·
The Relay Service provides a relay point in the cloud
that mobile applications can use to communicate.
·
The Rendezvous Service maps from well-known
human-readable names to endpoints in the Hawaii Relay
Service.
·
The Speech-to-Text Service takes a spoken phrase and
returns text. Currently this service supports English
only.
·
The Translator service enables a mobile application to
translate text from one language to another, and to obtain
an audio stream that renders a string in a spoken
language.
Obviously, given
my recent work
in the mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) space, Project Hawaii
results super interesting to me. After spending a few
hours playing with the current release, I thought the
experience would make a few interesting blog posts.
Let’s start with the Hawaii’s key-value service:
Project Hawaii’s
Key-Value Service (KVS) provides a simple key-value store
for mobile applications. By using the KVS, an application
can store and retrieve application-wide state information
as text using key-value pairs.
Obtaining a Project Hawaii Application ID
Prior to use any of the Project Hawaii
services, developers need to obtain a valid application
ID. We can achieve that by going to the Project Hawaii
signup page (http://hawaiiguidgen.cloudapp.net/default.aspx.) and
registering your Windows Live credentials. After that, you
will obtain an application identifier that can be used to
authenticate to the different cloud services. As
illustrated in the following figured.
After having completed this process, we need to register
our application in the Windows Azure Marketplace.
Using the Project Hawaii Key Value Service
As its name indicates, the key-value service provides a
service interface that enables mobile applications to
store information in key-value pair forms. The main
vehicle to leverage this capability is a RESTful interface
abstracted by SDKs for the Android, Windows Phone and
Windows 8 platforms. In the case of Windows 8, the
KeyValueService class included in the
Microsoft.Hawaii.KeyValue.Client
namespace abstracts the capabilities of the Project Hawaii
Key-Value service. The following matrix summarizes some of
the operations provided by the KeyValueService class.
Methods
|
Name |
Description |
|
CreateAsync |
Initiates a call to create a key-value item.
The item must not already exist. |
|
DeleteAsync |
Initiates a call to delete key-value items.
|
|
DeleteByKeysAsync |
Initiates a call to delete key-value items by
keys. |
|
GetAsync |
Initiates a call to get key-value items.
|
|
GetByKeyAsync |
Initiates a call to get key-value items by key.
|
|
GetByKeysAsync |
Initiates a call to get key-value items by
keys. |
|
SetAsync |
Initiates a call to set one or more key-value
items. If the key does not exist, the method
creates it. |
Like any good mBaaS SDK, the KeyValueService class
provides a very succinct syntax to integrate with the
Project Hawaii key-value service. For instance, the
following code illustrates the process of inserting
different items using the Project Hawaii key-value
service.
private const string clientID = "My Client ID";
private const string clientSecret = "My Client Secret";
private void SetItem_Test()
{
KeyValueItem item1 = new KeyValueItem() { Key = "Key2", Value = "value2" };
KeyValueService.SetAsync(clientID, clientSecret, new KeyValueItem[1]{item1}, this.OnSetComplete, null) ;
}
private async void OnSetComplete(SetResult result)
{
await Dispatcher.RunAsync(Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, async () =>
{
if (result.Status != Microsoft.Hawaii.Status.Success)
Result.Text = "Success";
else
Result.Text = "Error";
});
}
Similarly, applications can query items stored in the key-value infrastructure using the following syntax.
private void GetItem_Test()
{
KeyValueService.GetByKeyAsync(clientID, clientSecret, "Key1", GetByKeyComplete, null);
}
Key-value storage can be a really useful capability in
mobile applications. The Project Hawaii Key Value service
provides a very simple mechanism to enable mobile
application to leverage these capabilities using a very
simple syntax.
We will cover other capabilities of Project Hawaii in
future blog posts.