For up-to-date product documentation, see the IBM MobileFirst Foundation Developer Center.
Client app development environments
With IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation, we can develop your mobile app in the development environment of your choice as a native app or as a Cordova app.
We need two pieces in your development environment to develop a MobileFirst client application: a MobileFirst SDK, and the MobileFirst Platform CLI (mfpdev).
Depending on the target platform, the MobileFirst SDK is available in different ways:
- Native iOS apps
We can add the MobileFirst SDK to Xcode by using CocoaPods, or we can set up your development environment manually.
For more information about setting up your iOS development environment, see Develop native applications for iOS in Xcode.
- Native Android apps
We can add the MobileFirst SDK to Android Studio with Gradle, or we can set up your development environment manually.
For more information about setting up your Android development environment, see Develop native applications in Android Studio.
- Native Windows apps
We can add the MobileFirst SDK to VisualStudio with NuGet, or we can set up your development environment manually.
For more information about setting up your Windows development environment, see Develop native C# applications for Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform and Windows 8 Universal.
- Web apps
We can acquire the MobileFirst web SDK either from the IBM MobileFirst Platform Operations Console or by using npm (node package manager), and then manually add the SDK to our web project.
For more information about setting up your web development environment, see Develop web applications.
- Cordova apps
The MobileFirst SDK for Cordova is available as a plug-in that we can obtain by using npm (node package manager).
We can use IBM MobileFirst Studio plug-in to develop Cordova apps. For more information, see IBM MobileFirst Studio plug-in for managing Cordova projects in Eclipse.
For more information about setting up your environment to develop MobileFirst apps with Cordova, see Prerequisites for developing Cordova apps with MobileFirst features.
In addition to these development-platform specific installation methods, we can also get the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation Developer Kit to give you all of the components that you need to start developing your MobileFirst app.
When we develop your app, use the MobileFirst Platform CLI for the following types of tasks:
- Configure the client side of the application
- Update the server-side configuration of the application
- Defining the target
- Previewing and updating Cordova apps
For more information about the MobileFirst Platform CLI, see The MobileFirst command-line interface (CLI).
Parent topic: Development concepts and overview