Accessing Private Web Services from iPhone app - iphone

We have our website hosted on external data center and it interacts with various asp.net web services hosted on in-house servers. For security reasons, we have blocked public access to these web services and only external data center where website is hosted has access.
Now we are creating a iPhone app for the website and I'm wondering how we can access these private web services from the app which are downloaded to users' phones. Do we need to create a middle ware layer to accommodate the communication between iPhone app and the private web services? Or is there a better solution.

Phoenix,
Unfortunately for this type of application you need to create an intermediary layer. To do this you can create APIs with .Net to respond the calls required, resulting in an XML file and / or JSON that is perfectly interpreted by iOS frameworks. I thing that it is the best way.
Good Lucky

Related

Is possible to combine rest-api and angular profiles on Grails?

I'm going to start a new project that has two front ends, a mobile APP and a Web Application.
I was thinking about creating a "rest-api" grails application and consume this "api" from the mobile apps.
But, for the WebApp, is it possible to create a new "angular" Grails app that uses as model the previously generated "rest-api" Grails application and ovoids me to "re-implement the wheel (model)"?
Any articles/documentation how that could be accomplish?
Thanks in advance.
JD Evora
You can use the domain you already have in the new rest api, nothing changes. You may want to add the #Resource annotations.
If there is another app that uses this same domain, I would put in a plugin(as #Joshua suggested), we currently do it for clients which have both admin/cms and final user applications.
In our company,we are currently developing 3 projects with an idea I believe will fit well to your needs, or may help someone else who is starting a similar project
We organized the apps this way:
We've created a grails app with rest-api profile
We've created a grunt/bower/npm project(you could use yoo angular generator, but It had more than we needed)
We've created an android and and ios apps
Advantages we've seen:
The angular application calls the same methods as the mobile apps, there is only one controller, one service, one grails app
The web apps is pure JS and CSS and runs smoothly in the serve(npm
install serve)
You can deploy the web app in any CDN like Amazon Cloud Front and be able to handle a big demand, and you can deploy it quickly
Just in case you don't know, but with grunt and bower you can replace assets pipeline automation.
Hope it helps you!

Lotus Native Application on iPhone

How can i make a lotus application an iPhone native apps?
For e.g: eLeave.
The submit or approve action button in the form was created using lotusscript. So how can it work in iOS ? I have no idea how can i extend my lotus application to an iPhone Native Apps. Someone had suggested to use either SOAP or REST via HTTP to communicate between iOS and domino. But i don't even know what can i do with SOAP in my apps.
Pls help.
The suggestions along the lines of SOAP or other HTTP-based access to the data are correct. Since you can't just port a Notes app to the iPhone (for a variety of reasons) or use the Notes Java API classes (since the iPhone doesn't have Java), some form of HTTP access is your best bet. Either traditional Domino web access via forms or XPages are most likely the best way to go, since then you can write your UI in Designer. If you don't want to or can't do that for whatever reason, you're on the hook for writing the UI for your iOS app separately and then connecting to Domino via Web Services or REST functionality.
SOAP Web Services are probably what you want. They have the advantage of being supported directly in Designer - you can create a Web Service Provider in LotusScript or Java in much the same way you would write an Agent or Script Library. You would have to write methods to access and update the data you want, but it would also mean you have full control over what happens. You could re-implement your form-submission code as a web service call that takes the changed data as parameters and then does whatever manipulation you want and creates/saves the document.
It does depend on the version of Lotus/Domino you are running. This could be a start XPages Mobile Controls I am not sure about the "native"here. This is XPages, web based.
Based on your comment, I know of one native application TSAzr. This application uses XPages as web-services on the domino server. A bit more info can be found here dominoGuru
Your follow-up suggests that a mobile-optimised web application will not cut it, and that you want a native application. This means writing a new iOS application, end of story. There are different ways to go about this of course—e.g. you could build a web app and then wrapper it using something like Appcelerator Titanium, or PhoneGap—but ultimately, you need to write something.
As #Jesse Gallagher has already stated, Notes applications can't be ported directly to an iOS device. Apart from anything else, a Lotus Notes client application is a proprietary data store (NSF) sitting within a C and C++-based client built and compiled for the relevant underlying platform (Win or OS X). There is no direct analogue for iOS other than re-coding your app (of course, you could re-use the existing Lotusscript business logic via web service calls, as detailed in earlier answers).

Web service integration with iphone

I want to create iphone native app. which will use web service.Could any one tell me how many languages is supported by apple for web service. And which the best in performance ??
Your web service implementation is completely independent from your iPhone native app. Apple does not care what language you implement your web service in.
However, your web service client (i.e.: your iPhone app) must be written in Objective-C.
Simple Object Access Protocol is a webservice multi-platform language, and its the default for web services.
In a SOA these problems are addressed. Because the need to communicate with services that are not in the same programming language is something that happens normally. And there appears the SOAP protocol to normalize it.
This is independent from your iPhone.

iPhone app design and distribution model

I need to create an app for a large company.
Their aim is to distribute this app to all of their customers (who themselves are companies - not individuals) and the end-user will be able to query their relevant information through this app.
The app will receive all of its data through webservices and will require login on every use.
On the one hand a web application might be suitable as all the data is anyway online and also distribution of such an app would be trivial.
On the other hand, they might want features in the long term which use the camera etc. and also the administration of the website (in addition to the existing web services) might be a problem - which means a native app working with web services is the solution.
The next question is the preferred way of distribution for this app if it is a native app.
I know Apple have the Enterprise program (which seems to have changed - I no longer see the reference to >500 employees or 250 device limit).
In my case there is one main company distributing the app to many customers so I don't know whether this program is appropriate.
Any advice would be appreciated.
I once had a similar problem... we ended up with the application in the store and an authentication mechanism inside the application. Most likely, customers would have to provide the user credential they use to authenticate at the web application to the iPhone app as well.
For the decision whether to build a native application or use a web application, I would recommend using a hybrid approach. This way you can start with an application which is based on an UIWebView and extend it with features only available to native applications...

Wordpress database access in mobile applications

I am new to wordpress and I want to create an interface for being able to access my database hosted on wordpress in my mobile applications - particularly iPhone and Android.
As these do not directly access SQL databases and would need routines on the server-side for being able to do so, what would be the best way for me to go about writing these routines/web-service calls?
Are there any wordpress plugins available for this? If not, what language should I use - php or something else?
I need some lead.
Perhaps you do not need to access the database directly?
Wordpress supports the XML-RPC standard interface so applications can communicate with WP across the internet, without needing access to WP's database. http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_Support
If you choose to implement your apps' using XML-RPC, all your communication will be reduced to simple HTTP calls.
To get started I suggest checking out the source code of Wordpress' own iPhone application, which utilizes XML-RPC http://iphone.wordpress.org/
Also, note that Wordpress has published an extension to the XML-RPC API that includes WP specific functions: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp
I would suggest creating a webapp (iPhone style) for the phone application and calling everything with AJAX to a PHP (Due to Wordpress running PHP) backend to validate and execute the queries. iPhone webapps dev link I haven't found any solid tutorial/resource for developing BlackBerry webapps (Please post back if you find one)
Instead of creating a new app, or trying to port the database, check out WP Touch, which is a Wordpress plugin/theme which will turn your wordpress install into an iPhone friendly site on iPhones.