From Legacy To Mobile First

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We all dream of that greenfields project, using the latest technologies and targeting modern mobile devices, but most of us live in a world of existing legacy systems that weren’t built with mobile in mind. In this presentation, I’ll show how REA is tackling mobile development in a sea of legacy systems systems to make “mobile first” a reality. Attendees will learn about the challenges and rewards of microservice architectures and hypermedia APIs, as well as how that influences client side development for mobile devices.

The hardest aspect of building mobile apps is generally not the app itself, but in massaging the backend systems to provide the useful APIs that make developing mobile apps possible. Yesterday’s software systems are unable to deliver today’s mobile experiences. I present the shift from a monolithic desktop web app, to a system of microservice APIs with multiple mobile clients, using examples from REA sites realestate.com.au and 1Form.com.au.

I will present the challenges we faced and lessons we’ve learnt around:

• moving from a single deployed system to many systems running in AWS
• using consumer driven contracts to document and enforce system interactions
• consuming hypermedia APIs from mobile clients
• designing and developing for multiple mobile platforms in parallel
• structuring your teams for end-to-end delivery of features for mobile devices

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