In a video tutorial authored by Steve Fox, Director of Services for Microsoft titled Welcome to the New SharePoint 2013 Application Model, any subscriber to SharePoint-Videos.com can learn about this new method of developing applications for SharePoint Server 2013.
The video covers some ground already covered in another curriculum on the same topic, this time authored by Yaroslav Pentsarskyy. Both of these tutorial sets present 3 new App types for SharePoint Server 2013:
- SharePoint Hosted
- Autohosted
- Provider-Hosted
SharePoint Hosted
Apps for use in a SharePoint Hosted computing environment are made up of static files. “There is no server side code allowed when you build these Apps”. So developers usually build these Apps with HTML, or JavaScript (and, of course the jQuery function library).
SharePoint Hosted Apps are reposed in a special “App Domain” within SharePoint Server 2013.
AutoHosted
There are two components to the Autohosted App: “The App part and the web application”. The “App Part” is “mainly configuration information, which is deployed into SharePoint and the web app is automatically deployed into Azure.”
Once the web app is deployed into Azure it is automatically managed for the user. Azure customers are charged for services via a “consolidated bill”, which allows the user to use a subset of the Azure functionality to deploy, and then to build out the App”.
Provider Hosted
Provider Hosted provides the App developer with the most flexible of the 3 options. The “web portion” of the App can be deployed into any domain, Azure, or a comparable solution built on a different type of web serving, for example, Apache.
The web portion is then connected back to SharePoint with middleware like Microsoft’s Open Data Protocol. The user, of course, must manage the web part of the App in a Provider Hosted scenario.
As Steve Fox notes, the Provider Hosted option is a first for SharePoint development and opens opportunities to even PHP developers in a Linux O/S environment to build solutions for SharePoint Server 2013.
The remaining 9.5 minutes of this video tutorial are dedicated to a demonstration of how to configure the Development Environment (which was presented in the prior video in this series), including VisualStudio 2013 to best serve each of these 3 development options.
© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved