In my iphone application I am calling (by SOAP post method) a web service which is written in .net and hosted on a server, and its all working fine. But my doubt is, can we write a web service in objective c? And host it on a server? so that we should be able to access it from any of the platforms like .net, php and objectiveC.
I read a fantastic tutorial regarding this question some time ago here.
To be honest, it can be quite difficult to really use this in a productive environment. If you want to get all the features and tools Apple gives to you (what seems to be the intention of your question), you'll have to use a Mac in order to run your service afterwards.
In my opionion using PHP for example (if you need a db also backed up by MySQL) is much easier. Almost all hosters support it and you won't have to worry about setting up a bunch of macs and connecting them via solid and stable cables to the internet (and with that: guarantee availability).
Yes. A web service is just some application that can provide a service over the web. As you can create an application in Objective C, it can be a web service the same as made in any other language.
You can make it run on any server where you have an objective C compiler, however, the framework you use may restrict your choices to the server (ie, you can write objective C on windows, but you wouldn't be able to use the NS framework)
Web services are not limited to a programming language, however you do need to find if there is any framework using objective-c can run on specific server. For example, iiS allows you to use Asp.net which could be implemented using C# or VB.Net.
From the clients who will consume web services, they don't have to be a specific type of device. I think that's the point of web services. The messages travel in between is formatted. For example, a SOAP message is using xml, and that would ensure the message travel on HTTP. Therefore no matter you use iPhone or Android or Blackberry, you should have no problem to make web service calls.
So in general, I think you have to see what kind of web services you want to create, and then see if Apple(I assume) can provide you with a good framework to do it. In terms of client side, as long as your web services are using XML or JSON, it should be well supported.
Hope it helps.
Related
I'm trying to make my Monotouch app work with WCF service. Everything works fine but every now and then (10 - 30 service calls), app crashes with SIGIL. Debugger says just that.
It happens on random places.
Another employee works on iPhone app which uses same service. Same problem, but more frequent.
Everything works great when testing on simulator.
If somebody's had same problem, please help. Would using asmx service help?
Thank you all.
Cheers
WCF is a bloated option on high traffic servers at the best of days, using SOAP in a mobile application is a enough of a waste of resources that it should be considered bad practice.
ServiceStack is a much leaner and faster option that also allows you to access your same web services with ServiceStack's strong-typed, code-gen-free Service Client's using .NET's fastest JSON and JSV Text serializers.
The MonoTouch versions of ServiceStack's service clients is available separately from:
https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/tree/master/release/latest/MonoTouch
And an example MonoTouch application that showing how to use is available here:
https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack.Examples/tree/master/src/MonoTouch/RestFilesClient
Not much an answer, but I had a similar issue. Worked for a long time to get my desktop WCF client code running on MonoTouch, only to have the app die after 10 or so calls on SIGIL.
Symbolicating and analysing the crash reports showed the app dying somewhere in the WCF stack every time. However I could not distill the issue down into a trivial, reproducable example.
In the end I used the ServiceStack framework (http://www.servicestack.net/) to throw a simple XML REST endpoint in front of my service, and called it using simple WebClient requests and some helper methods to push my objects to/from XML (DataContractSerializer was too slow).
If you have access to the server side, this may be your simplest approach.
We have a web-based BI reporting product. We have exposed certain webservices which mainly return html content and do authentication.
We are in a initial process of developing an iPhone App, which will interact with these services and get data on iPhone.
There are couple of things we need to make sure before we start with the actual development process...
1) Should we use SOAP or REST (Will have to write the server part in Java) for the communication between iPhone and our web-application?
2) If we use SOAP, Can you suggest something, which will effectively create web services stubs in Objective-C.
3) In either case (SOAP or REST), what security mechanism is suggested by Apple?
We want to know your thoughts on the best and effective way communication could be done between iPhone app and backend servers (mostly written in Java)
Thanks in advance.
If it is an option, I'd use REST
Never did it, but may this will help: http://abhicodehelp.blogspot.com/2010/12/handling-soap-with-iphone.html
I'd do any HTTP-Communication using ASIHttpRequest. It is SSL-capable
In my apps I use simple URL requests returning XML / Cocoa-touch plists over https. I guess that's called "REST" -- it's simple and quick to implement. There are long flame-fests over SOAP vs. REST -- I just use this technique and get my apps done :)
Looking for a recommendation of which framework/web server to go with on Linux. The idea is to build database backed RESTful web services.
I know Java, c++, c# (irrelevant I guess on linux) and C. Okay with developing in any of those.
Here is a table of frameworks that have varying degrees of support for REST and the languages they use.
You might want to check out RESTx. It is multi lingual: You can write code in Java, Python (server-side JavaScript coming soon). RESTx is specifically a platform for the creation of RESTful resources and web services. It is NOT a traditional application framework. DB backed web services are actually a specialty of RESTx: You identify the reusable components you want (in this case a JDBC capable DB access component), and then just configure it through the RESTful API or by filling out a small form in a browser. As a result, you get a new RESTful web service, which encapsulates the query you specified when creating the new resource.
I'm the lead developer on RESTx, so if you have any questions, please contact me or visit our forums.
If I were you I would go with Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3
they're fun and you get to learn something new
ubuntu specific install guide: http://web2linux.com/installing-rails-3-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/
official RoR intro: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
I've started my degree project, a mobile application suitable for iPhone, Android and (in the near future) Symbian. The server architecture is the following:
web site (for "standard" users);
web service (for mobile connections), based on TomCat and Axis2;
mySQL DB to storage users data.
Surfing across the web, I've read a lot of discussion about the interaction between the iPhone and Web Services, and I've to say that I've not a clear idea of what I can do and what not.
Let's start from the protocol used to retrieve data from the DB: the Android-side application uses SOAP protocol, can I do the same with iPhone? Are there some limitations or problems?
I have also read about the using of REST instead of SOAP, could it be possible with the server architecture described above? Which are the main advantages/disadvantages?
Sorry if these questions sound "n00b", but it's my first real experience with iPhone and the lot of informations found on the web messed up my mind and I'm scared to be confused. Forgive me for any error.
SOAP is simply too heavy for mobile communications. Why do all the work to wrap requests in an additional XML layer you'll have to parse? You send more data than you need to, and impose greater CPU burden on client and server.
Use REST. If you are doing a cross-platform project JSON makes a great payload container, otherwise plists work well for sending data from the server.
You can definitely do SOAP on the iPhone. Here is a nice tutorial on the subject. After all, SOAP is a HTTP based protocol and you have all the libraries you need to do HTTP on the iPhone.
Having said that, RESTful APIs are simpler than SOAP, so you might want to consider them. They're also HTTP based so you won't have any problems on doing that on iPhone. On the server side, if you use Java, you will have to use JAX-RS to implement that part.
Hope it helps.
Google Buffers
If your looking for a language and platform agnostic solution have a look at Google Buffers. You can easily serialise objects for transmission over the wire.
This question should get you started in Objective-C.
JSON
I have also used JSON within iPhone Apps with great success. Again, relatively language and platform agnostic but much simpler than Google Buffers.
SOAP with Fast Infoset is suited for small devices:
JAX-WS 2.0 and its reference implementation support both Fast Infoset and MTOM/XOP. This article includes information about Web Service Performance for Fast Infoset vs. MTOM/XOP:
http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/35385/1954
Fast Infoset is optimized for small
devices that have bandwidth
constraints, and is supported by many
vendors such as Microsoft .NET and
.NET CF, Sun GlassFish, BEA WebLogic,
IBM SDK for Java 6.0 and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Infoset
I made an app in VB that I want to turn into a web service. I've been told I can create a web service from VB.NET but how? Can I convert my app into a ASP.NET app or do I have to re-write it? Can I turn my app into an Active X control and create a active x web service?
It's probably good to first try to understand exactly what you want and why you need it. A web service has little to do with ActiveX or ASP.NET technologies. It is a way to call methods of your libraries using SOAP or REST (or similar) requests. Once you know what for you need it, you can decide how to set it up.
You can use all the code you currently have but only if it was designed to be used with a library in mind. That means: no interactive forms, messageboxes etc. There are other restrictions, but let's not get ahead of ourselves too much.
To get from A to B, change your code such that it compiles as a DLL lib that you can use and call from other applications. From there to a web service is then only a small step away.