I'm not sure this question is appropriate here but I hope I could get some help. What i'm looking to do is basically to make a server based iPhone application. I've got an ubuntu server ready to be used. I'm thinking of making a web service which my application then can use but I have virtually no experience in this field so i'm looking for some help to get pointed into the right direction, what language to write the web service in etc. It isn't required to be a web service but anything that make's the iPhone app depending on the server.
This little mission is simply for learning experience.
Probably PHP is what you will use to write the webservice. REST based services are the most popular, but it could be as simple as a form POST passing in parameters. The PHP script (no matter which way you write it), will then pass those parameters and any other needed info to a server method that either executes a SQL query (preferably using a stored procedure) or uses some other server resource. That data would then be output via the webservice as either XML or JSON (I personally like JSON better).
Check out Ray Wenderlich's tutorial on just this kind of thing:
When it comes time to handle the request in iOS, my personal choice is AFNetworking. It uses blocks instead of delegate methods and is blazing fast. I can hook you up with examples if needed.
Ok, First you need to learn how to write web services in PHP. Which will return you response in XML format. I personally prefer .PLIST format because it gets easier to parse on the iOS.
Once your web services are up and running. You need to use NSURLConnection and NSURLRequest to talk to your web services. Implementing the NSURLConnection Delegate methods correctly, you can download your XML response, maybe save it in a file on your Documents Directory.
Then once done downloading start parsing that response using NSXMLParser. implementing the delegates and what not, you can create your data structure the way you feel comfortable with manipulating it and store the parsed results in them and populate your View accordingly.
Related
Could anybody clarify the process of consuming aspx webservices in iOS? I have already tried JSON framework but now, need to create an app that consumes .net webservices in XML format. I need both to post some data to, and get data from the server. I already read about existing XML parsers for iOS that I found (here)
The question is do I need to do additional setup, like wrapping my query strings in SOAP or smth, in order to communicate with webserver? Would it be sufficient to use only one of mentioned libraries in the link or do I need additional stuff?
UPDATE: I found one tutorial on web (here) that demonstrates how to consume web services using Json-framework. Also, I found another one that demonstrates it using NSXMLParser (here). I'm not not very familiar with WSDL and SOAP, so any detailed explanation on how to implement would be desirable :). In both of these examples you just have to construct a request string in xml format and execute it, and that's it. Both examples actually bypasses the heavyness of SOAP and WSDL, so I was wondering do I have to know and do more that just construct a request string, execute it and get response?
While wsdl2objc is out there (as noted by #Girish Kolari), the truth is that there's no easy answer. I've never successfully gotten wsdl2objc working well for something that I couldn't have done more easily by hand. You will need to learn SOAP and WSDL. That's just a fact of life if you can't get access to a REST interface. In my experience, your best bet for simple SOAP access is to do it by hand, and your best bet for somewhat complicated SOAP access is gSOAP. Your best bet for very complicated access is to redesign something so it's not so complicated, ideally in REST. SOAP is a giant pain that some languages (C#) shield you from. ObjC does not shield you from it, so it continues to be a giant pain.
Yes, SOAP leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
i want to read and write data to a website (server on web) and don't have any information about webservices and other things that related to it
Does anybody have any idea about how to start it (mean offer complete books,papers,tutorials,websites,… or what should i learn at first mean is it necessary to learn xml,soap,... and other things)
Thank you
I've used Google App Engine with great success. You would format your data to output as JSON and use an iPhone library to read it. I've used this one (though Touch JSON seems to be more popular).
Read about REST, ROA and AtomPub. Thats got me started. I'm about to implement some webservices in WCF (WCF now acts like a RESTFul webservice, but you can also use plain old SOAP). Before I got to WCF, I experimented with RoR. RoR uses REST "out-of-the-box".
we were asked to develop an iphone app like the one in the figure.
The problem is: we have no experience in IOS development.
For the basic part I can handle the learning curve, but i need suggestions, best practices on the UIKit model and controls.
This is a newspaper app.
The accordion control shows/hides content based on categories retrieved by an ASP .NET CMS on which we have no control.
I can suggest to the CMS holder to develop a couple of web services (WCF) but i'm not sure how to interface iOS with MS technology.
Furthermore, i have the idea that simple aspx that returns XML/JSON data will be easier to call, and support, but slightly less secure.
So, suggestions? Tutorials?
If you like to use JSON and a very good HTTP-request-framework I have two links for you. Both sites contain various tutorials on how to use them.
json-framework
ASIHTTPRequest
Concerning the request and delegate stuff: For a start, I would skip the delegate part and use a synchronized HTTP request called in a thread (you'll see what that is on the second website). That makes the response handling a lot easier for the start. But I personally think, that using an asynchronous request is not a must. It's just nicer, if the architecture allows it. In my application, it wasn't realizable without lots of code overhead.
You want to output an XML feed in "plist" format (look it up, its simple theres lots of info on it).
Then you can do:
NSArray *plistContents = [NSArray arrayWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://theinternet.com/pathToMyPlist.asp"]];
That will get all the output into an array.
Some other resources you may find interesting/useful include NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection. For the latter you will have to learn about delegate methods and such - its complicated, but its incredibly useful information.
We did several applications here using XML parsing like what you're suggesting at the end of your question. If you are concerned about security, you can implement handshaking or other security measures over that.
EDIT: XML parsing done using NSURLConnection to gather the content and NSXMLParser/NSXMLParserDelegate to do the actual parsing.
EDIT2: There is an official sample, called SeismicXML from Apple. It should get you started with iPhone XML parsing and data downloading.
I'm working on an iPhone project that needs to receive data from a PHP script during execution. My first thought was to use sockets/streams on either end to connect the two, but I am having trouble finding information on how to do this from the iPhone side.
Has anyone been down this path that could point me towards some useful resources or offer some advice? The official documentation seems to be geared more towards desktop apps and uses code that doesn't seem to be supported on the iPhone (namely NSHost).
Update: The intended use of this app is to receive log messages from an executing script, so I can't use a simple HTTP request with JSON or XML. Many cases will involve the page being loaded by another client, where the script would relay/push log messages to the iPhone.
Polling is evil. You'll chew through batteries doing that.
You might consider running an HTTP server on the iPhone. Check out this blog post; it has an implementation of an HTTP server in Cocoa as well as example code for using it for two-way communication.
The PHP CURL library (can't link it because the site doesn't trust me yet, just search php.net for it) is a (relatively) simple, easy way to make http requests with a PHP script.
Why don't you just use HTTP? Create an ad-hoc protocol with XML or JSON, use POST for upstream data transmission. I'm a fan of JSON for this sort of thing, personally. The PHP, instead of returning a webpage in HTML for rendering, should just return your data in a JSON format.
I have a fair bit of experience working with the iPhone SDK. I have a couple fully developed apps including a utility application for tracking data and a board game. I would consider myself a novice on the iPhone SDK. I also have no issues with reviewing documentation and examples for hours until I understand something, as long as the documentation exists and makes sense.
I am not however an expert at XML documents and parsing attributes and creating documents. I have written in the past PHP code to access web services and complete transactions via SOAP XML messaging. I need to do a similar application using iPhone SDK. Here is what I need.
1) Create XML messages to send to a SOAP service
2) Receive XML messages from a SOAP service
3) Parse the XML response messages into a custom object
All of the URL and SOAP part is relatively straight forward. Where I start to get discouraged is the area of creating and parsing the XML messages. Using PHP these tasks are very simple as the language has built in SOAP clients and you can easily class map objects to SOAP messaging and the heavy lifting of the XML processing is just taken care of automatically. I have considered writing a proxy PHP service and simplifying what is needed on the iPhone side but this just complicates what I want and adds a dependency on another app to work in conjunction with the web service I'm accessing.
It seems that in the iPhone SDK or objective-c in general you have to be a pro at the construction and the parsing of XML messages on your own. I am really discouraged at the idea of creating tons of custom code to parse each message element by element. I've taken a small look at TouchXML / KissXML and I am not thinking they are what I need.
The real key objective here is that I want to easily receive an XML message and some how get the elements and their values copied over to an object. How can this be done without hours of writing parsing classes and understanding all of the guts of creating XML documents?
I have used Matt Gallagher's XPathQuery to great success on the iPhone. It's simple and straight-forward.
I've found, though, that the messages I have need to parse are drastically simpler than what XML (and even his simplified parser) is capable of. I've modified his source to return a data structure that's much easier to work with -- instead of having keys a bunch of keys (nodeName, nodeContent, nodeAttributeArray, attributeName, ...) for each node, I simply create nested arrays and dictionaries with the node name as the key and the content as the object directly. I completely ignore attributes, and I only use arrays if there's more than one node with the same name. Here's that code. Note that it's only been tested on the XML that I care to work with. :)
Edit: whoops, I just realized you're also looking for XML creation. This just does parsing. I'll leave it here as a partial answer.
It seems like what you really want is this:
http://code.google.com/p/wsdl2objc/
As it will create objects for you from a WSDL, and provide support code to send/receive them.
However what is mostly happening, is that people are not using SOAP for mobile web services, but instead are going to RESTFUL approaches.
That includes posting form data in HTTP POST requests or querying via GET, then getting back either JSON or plists which turn into dictionaries (JSON is more widely understood by server developers BUT you have to be more careful to correctly define the structures being passed, since you can do things like have a dictionary with the same key repeated... plists are more robust in that you can't really build anything "wrong" but is less standard on the server side).
If you have to use SOAP though, WSDL2ObjC is probably going to save you a lot of mapping.