DreamFactory and IBM MobileFirst Platform

I’m in the process of investigating approaches for integrating a web & mobile app with multiple data sources using IBM MobileFirst. If you don’t know how this works, MF has a concept of adapters whereby any data access is done via an adapter which runs on the MF server and means you can access data from the client without having to worry about security … at least MF handles it (we’re using AngularJS/Ionic by the way).

Obviously this means the client does not interact directly with the data servers so authentication with dream factory would need to be from the MF server (the adapter) to dream factory, and from there to the database. This seems to me like a roundabout route and also raises a question in my mind about the way I authenticate with dream factory (because user authentication happens in the layer above and as such I don’t want/need to authenticate specific users with dream factory).

If I was writing an open source solution then it seems to me that dream factory would effectively replace the MF platform in terms of it being the channel for communicating securely with the various data sources I require, but when MF is in the picture it seems to me that it is probably an unnecessary layer.

Thanks

Kevin