Browse Category by Oracle MCS
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Oracle MCS 16.2.3 (v2.0) realeased. MAX and Location Services are now available

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service 16.2.3 (v2.0) has been released. This is the second major release in less than 1 year (Oracle MCS was released in July 2015). Although not every MCS instance has this new version, we can already see what’s new in it.

  • Location Based Services
We are now able to present information based on the location or preferences of the user. Thanks to the Location API we can get information about the location devices, assets and places.
A Location Device is any device that provices location services, for example a beacon.
Currently Oracle MCS provides support for this protocols:
    • Altbeacon (Open Source)
    • Google’s Eddystone
    • Apple’s iBeacon
The second one is a Place  that is a physical location that you can associate with a device.
And the last one is an Asset. This is a mobile object that can be also associated with a location device.
Oracle MCS provides a REST API using the following endpoint “/mobile/platform/location/devices”
  • Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator (Oracle MAX)
Although I already had the chance to see what Oracle MAX offered back in January in a Workshop in Madrid, I was exited to see new features that MAX provides since then.
Oracle MAX is a Rapid Mobile Application Development (RMAD) tool that help us to build applications easier and faster. This tool allows business users and non developers to build applications.
It provides a development based on wizards where we can define the layout, selecting one from the predefined layouts and building each of the screens using components like lists, froms or charts consuming the APIs we have designed and implemented in Oracle MCS.
At this point we have to download Oracle MAX application that is available in Google Play Store and Apple App Store and scan the generated QR.
Who knows what features will bring future versions but it would be great if we will be allowed to download the source code to improve and extend those applications. 
  • More features
Other new features included in this version are new Security Policies for REST Connectors (Oauth and JWT) and we can also allow the users to login into the apps using their Microsoft Azure Active Directory by configuring it as an identity provider.
More posts will come in the next few weeks, stay tuned!
You can get more information in this link: What’s New in Mobile Cloud Service?
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Oracle MAF: Oracle MCS as authentication provider

An usual requirement when working with Oracle Mobile Application Framework and Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is implement the login against Oracle MCS.
In this post I am going to show you how to configure Oracle MCS as an authentication provider in Oracle MAF.

  • Creating a Realm
A realm is a security context for a ser of users. We can have only one realm for each Mobile Backend, but we can have multiple Mobile Backend using the same realm.
Using one or more realm in MCS will depend on what users we will like to give access to our application.
Under Applications, we can find Mobile User Management. By default there is one realm named ‘default’, but we can create a new one by clicking on ‘New Realm’ button.
In the realm we can find some user information by default altough we can add more properties.

  • Create and configure a Mobile Backend
A Mobile Backend (MBE) is the gateway to Mobile Cloud Service. If we want to access any available resource from MCS, for example an API, we have to do it though an MBE.

We can find Mobile Backends option under Applications menu option.

Click on ‘New Mobile Backend’ to create a new one.

Once you have created the MBE head to Users option and click on ‘Change user realm’, by default the MBE has a realm but in this case we need to set the new realm we have just created. This is not the case, but we can also set a default realm for every new created MBE.

In the popup we can select any existing realm.

After that, as there is no users in the realm you can add them by clicking on ‘Add New User’ button.

You will receive an email to the email address you used to register the user.
  • Configuring a MAF Application.
The last step is to configure the MAF application. Here is a couple of things that we have to do.
First we need to create a secured page. We can do it in maf-feature.xml
The last thing is to configure the login server.
To do this, we need to open maf-aplication.xml. We can find the file in ‘Application Resources’ under descriptors/ADF META-INF folder.
Click on the add button.

In the popup we have to select HTTP Basic as Authentication type and set a name to the connection.

In HTTP Basic tab we need to configure login and logout URLs.
To build this URLs we need to know the base URL, and add to it at the end ‘/mobile/platform/users/login’ in Login URL and “/mobile/platform/users/logout” in Logout URL.
We can check the base URL in MBE Settings menu option.

The last step in the cofiguration is to add a custom header. The header name will be ‘Oracle-MobileBackend-ID’ and the value can be also found in MBE Settings menu option.

We just have to execute the application. As soon as we do it, the login page will appear.
If we set the right credentials we will access our secured page.
But if we enter wrong credentials we will se a’Invalid username or password.’ error message.



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Oracle MCS version 16.1.3 (v1.2) released

A couple of weeks after Oracle MCS 1.1 (16.1.1) was released, I saw that Oracle MCS What’s new page was updated but until now I did not realised the instance has been updated to this new version.

This new version is 16.1.3 (v1.2) and is now live in Oracle MCS instances. It’s good to see that Oracle keeps updated MCS becasue in less than 3 months we have a new version.

In this new released version there are some changed for every role involved in a MCS development project. These are some of the new features:

  • Enabled Facebook login and Enterprise Singles Sign-On
Now we can enable our mobile users to log into the mobile apps using their Facebook account or their corporate SSO credentials.

  • Debuging notifcations
Oracle MCS provides a device registry where you can check every registered device. It will not show if the token is invalid or if the devide has not been reregisted in 60 days.
  • Notifications REST API
Now we can send driver-especific payloads instead of writting all the code.
  • JavaScript SDK
JavaScript SDK has been re-tooled to support browser-based mobile applications.
  • Database SDK
It is now much easier to interact with MCS Database from Custom APIs implementation.
  • Purge and restore artifacts
In previous versions we were able to delete any artifact but it wasn’t deleted permanently from our MCS instance. Now we can purge MCS artifacts trash or restore or restore items if we deleted if accidentally
You can get more information in this link: http://bit.ly/1SUbZKu

OTN Tech Article: PCS, MCS and MAF Integration

I have just published my first OTN Tech Article where I present a use case that demonstrates how Oracle Process Cloud Service (Oracle PCS), Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (Oracle MCS) and Oracle Mobile Application Framework (Oracle MAF) can be use together to expose  an Oracle PCS process instance as a web service and consume it from an external system, web application or mobile application.


“Oracle Process Cloud Service is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provided by Oracle Cloud, allows you to rapidly design, automate, and manage business processes in the cloud.“


“Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is Oracle’s Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and enables companies to create and deploy scalable, robust, and secure mobile applications quickly and easily.“


“Oracle Mobile Application Framework is a hybrid mobile framework that provides a visual and declarative development experience for the rapid development of multi-platform applications“

You can check the full article here: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-996644

First Mobile Cloud Service project in Spain is now in prodution!

This is an important week in the mobile scene where Mobile World Congress is taking place in Barcelona, I think there is no better time to announce that the first Oracle Mobile Cloud Service in Spain is now in production. If you don’t know what Mobile Cloud Service is, you can check all my previous posts here. Posts about Mobile Cloud Service.

In avanttic we developed this project combining Oracle Mobile Application Framework with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, which has allowed us to implement a mobility solution for the sales force of Industrial Farmacéutica Cantabra (IFC) in no time. The application will allow IFC to gain efficiency in their sales process and increase the turnover.

About the technology:


“Oracle Mobile Application Framework is a hybrid mobile framework that enables developers to rapidly develop multi-platform single-source applications Oracle MAF provides a visual and declarative development experience and maximizes code reuse resulting in faster development of mobile applications.”


“Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is Oracle’s Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and enables companies to create and deploy scalable, robust, and secure mobile applications quickly and easily, and empowers developers to leverage enterprise IT systems—without having to get IT involved”








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