We’re happy to present brainCloud 2.7 – Easter Bunny Edition! 🙂

It’s been a busy couple of weeks as we prepare brainCloud for some pretty significant updates.  In the meantime, we’re delivering some smaller easter eggs of goodness just in time for the holidays.

Highlights

• External Web Services – Cloud Code scripts can now call external web services.  This greatly opens up the power of Cloud Code – allowing your apps to securely integrate with your own custom servers and/or third party services.  More details, including a tutorial.
• Leaderboard API changes – in release 2.6 we introduced paging and relative views to our global leaderboards. The response was very favourable (some of you have already live with the new APIs!) – but alas we believe we missed a feature or two – like returning the total number of entries. We’ve addressed this, and restructured the APIs a bit to allow even more features in the future!
• Reset User Stats – another popular request – it is now possible to reset a stat to its original value for the entire population of your app! Just click on the lightning bolt!

Portal Changes

• [New] Cloud Code Web Services Page – located under Design | Cloud Code | Web Services, this page is used to construct a whitelist of services that can be called from your Cloud Code scripts.
• [Updated] User Stats Page – new button allows you to reset a stat across all users
• [Updated] Apps Management Page – redesigned to allow us to add additional features/functions in the future.  As a bonus, now includes a count of the number of users your app has… (calculated nightly)
• [Redesigned] User Monitor Page – redesigned user monitoring page, with a new [Log In As User] button at the bottom.

API Changes / Additions

• New HttpProxyService – called from Cloud Code to allow calls to external web services.  Developers must create an entry in the web services whitelist first. [Go to Design | Cloud Code | Web Services ].  For more details, see the API Docs.
• Leaderboard API changes – Based on developer feedback, we’ve made some modifications to the Leaderboard APIs introduced in Release 2.6.  The updated APIs can be viewed on the API Docs page.  Important Note – Release 2.7 still supports the 2.6 parameters, but that support will be removed in 2.8 (targeted for April 15th) – so upgrade to the new APIs now!

Misc Changes

• [Updated] API Explorer – Authenticate service  – E-mail authentication is now the default authentication type. We’ve also changed the system defaults so that e-mail validation is *not* required for users to log in…  (a friendlier default for most apps)
• Misc Improvements / Updates to the API Docs