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What is Altogic?

Altogic is a backend as a service platform, enabling developers and businesses to design, deploy and manage scalable backend apps. Altogic platform has visual development tools and a cloud platform. You use the development tools to build and manage your backend applications while the cloud platform hosts and runs them.

Developing a backend app in Altogic basically involves three main steps. First, you define the data model of your application. Second, you create your application services and link them to RESTful endpoints. Finally, you create an environment and deploy your application to this environment to start running services.

Throughout the application development and execution process in Altogic, there is nothing to download. As soon as an app is created on Altogic, it is hosted on Altogic's cloud infrastructure, and it can be accessed from anywhere by anybody with the right credentials (e.g., API keys, session tokens).

Altogic does not create any application source code or perform any source code compilation while executing your backend applications. Under the hood, all business logic of your application is defined in services that are executed when a request is received, or an execution event is triggered.

Visual development tools​

Designer​

Altogic designer is the core visual development tool that you use to design, develop and deploy your backend applications and accessed in the browser. Most of the time, you and your team members will be using the designer tool to define your app's data model, develop your business logic through no-code and full-code services, expose these services using RESTful endpoints and deploy your app to an execution environment.

Tester​

Tester is an interactive tool to help you verify the services of your applications. Similar to the Designer, the Tester is also accessed in the browser. Thus, when you deploy your application to an environment, you can immediately start testing your application services through endpoints, message queues, and tasks.

Data navigator​

‌ If you use the data modeling and management capabilities of Altogic, you can use the Data Navigator tool to view and manage your application data, files and cache keys. Similar to other visual tools, the Data Navigator is also accessed in the browser. Using the Data Navigator, you can; ‌

  • View and manage application data (e.g., create, read, update and delete)
  • View and manage cloud storage buckets and files (e.g., manually manage uploaded files, rename, copy, delete)
  • View and manage application cache keys

Watcher (coming soon)​

Watcher is used to manage & monitor the environments of your applications. Similar to other visual tools, the Watcher is also accessed in the browser. Using the Watcher, you can; ‌

  • Monitor the performance of your app's environments
  • Assess data storage, cloud storage, realtime and cache usage and capacity
  • View service (aka cloud function) execution performance metrics
  • Access service execution logs

Cloud platform​

Altogic's cloud platform consists of regional (e.g., North America, Western Europe) application execution clusters to create your application's environments. An environment is a space where your application data is stored, managed and your application's RESTful services are executed.

When you create a new environment, you basically reserve compute and storage capacity in one of the execution clusters of the selected region. Then, following the deployment of your application to the environment, you start using from the reserved capacity.

What can you build with Altogic?​

Altogic lets you build RESTful services for your applications. The backend services can be accessed from any frontend, either from a browser on a computer, tablet, or phone, from a mobile app, or even from a smart TV app. Furthermore, since Altogic exposes RESTful API endpoints, these endpoints can be called from any client independent of whether the client has a user interface or not.

tip

We recommend using Altogic's client API to connect your frontend to you Altogic backend. Altogic's client API provides additional functionality that significantly eases app development.

Altogic's powerful designer tool is open-ended, and there's no fixed set of possibilities. By combining different data and services, you can create very simple to extremely complex application backends. Without getting into a detailed list of features, Altogic supports:

  • Creating user accounts, sessions and authorizing user sessions to execute services using access groups
  • Creating, modifying, deleting, and retrieving data
  • Caching data in memory for faster access
  • Paginating and iterating over large datasets
  • Executing multiple database operations at once using transactions
  • Uploading, downloading, and managing files
  • Connecting to external services that expose a RESTful API (including payments, authentication providers, etc.)
  • Graphically building complex business logic using core, custom, and marketplace nodes and connectors
  • Asynchronously execute complex or time-consuming business logic using message queues
  • Scheduling tasks to run periodically at fixed times, or intervals
  • Injecting custom code to your backend applications to handle edge cases when needed (coming soon)

How Altogic can help?​

Even after decades of the invention of the computer, application development is still complex, takes a long time, and consumes significant resources. App development is complex because many moving parts and technologies need to be put together and work seamlessly. The overall application development process takes a long time and requires significant automation to shorten the overall duration of development.

Altogic can help IT organizations, businesses, startups, and developers develop their applications much easier and faster. We lower the cost of application development and maintenance through our cloud platform and automate key stages in the application development process (e.g., design, implementation, integration, and maintenance) so that you can focus on more value-adding activities.

Using Altogic, while you design your application, you actually build it, meaning you do not need to convert (e.g., code) your design to an executable app. You can deploy your app design to your preferred environment and start using your app services in seconds. Similarly, changes in your app design are also automatically reflected in your execution environments in near real-time.

Altogic also provides you the key technologies you need to develop your application backend pre-integrated. With Altogic, you can manage your database CRUD operations, pagination, iteration, and transactions, handle complex business logic, upload/download files, use memory cache for faster access to frequently used data, use message queues for asynchronous service execution, send and receive realtime messages through websockets, and schedule jobs that are run periodically or at a specific date and time.

Additionally, Altogic is a collaborative application development platform. You can add team members with different authorization levels to your apps and work on apps simultaneously from multiple locations. Users view and edit the app data in real-time — instantly seeing edits made by other team members.