Mobile Couch

Russell Ivanovic (@rustyshelf) joins the couch to discuss back-end services for mobile apps, the differences between software-as-a-service and building your own web service, and go into why you might choose one over the other. After several side tracks, including trying to figure out who has the higher Crossy Road score, and a whole bunch of French, Jake kicks things off by asking why you might want to integrate web services to begin with. Since everyone pretty much agrees on the answer (and that iCloud does not a good back-end make), they move onto discussing some of the services out there, like Parse and Azure, that allow you to create something with some amount of transparency. Jelly feels left out, and begins to explain that his method of choice is to build a service from scratch, usually in (the abhorrently evil) PHP, and Russell chimes in to explain how the web services for Pocket Casts and Pocket Weather are built from scratch in Java and Ruby on Rails. Jake doesn’t feel like this is an option for h