I am facing a challenge to upload & download data, to and from the server using RESTful web services.
Is it possible to use a RESTful service client, if possible any way to achieve that in an iOS app to send data to the service.
#Ajay: As Claus mentioned there are number of public frameworks/wrappers are there, you can use them for RESTful service interaction from your code. The one I frequently use is ASIHttpRequest, quite handy and easy to use. There are enough examples out there with ASIHttpRequestyou can use it as reference.
Let me know if that helps.
You question is not clear. Do you need to push data from the server to the iOS app using a REST service?
If so, REST does not provide an interface for push. (It only provides a client->server Create/Read/Update/Delete API).
Take a look at ASIHTTPRequest or use RestKit for some more advanced stuff!
RestKit works really nice!
Related
I am in the process of creating an app (cross-platform with Ionic framework) and during my research about app with this framework I found the one created for HabitRPG and it is using an API to retrieve data, it totally suits my app as well, but I don't know where to start to create an API nor what to use.
I allready did some quick test with Spring, NodeJS and Symfony (with FOS) but I'm looking for something really easy to use and to setup but still to have a lot of flexibility (like manage security, users, and data visibility).
Is there a specific technology easy enough to start with ?
If you want to create a Web API and host it, you can perhaps have the look at APISpark (http://restlet.com/products/apispark/). It's an online plateform that allows to design your APIs following REST principles and then host them. The data are also managed by the platform.
Hope it helps.
Thierry
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 :)
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 have an iPhone application created by an external consultancy that we're planning to add card payment facilities to in a subsequent release.
We plan to host a service ourselves in order to process the payment stuff, with SSL encryption. We have in-house expertese for all of this apart from the (contracted out) iPhone bit.
Are there any specific gotchas that we should be aware of that concern designing web services for iPhones?
We'll be writing the web service in C# 3.5.
JSON data format is better to be converted into NSArray or NSDictionary objects. It's easier and faster to be parsed.
So, specifically for the iPhone, it's a lot better to consume JSON data. Unless if there's some technical complexity that JSON is unable to handle.
Check YAJL:
http://github.com/lloyd/yajl
There are Objective-C wrapper/implementations by gabriel in github and by MGTwitterEngine.
TouchJSON is another code that's simpler than yajl. You can convert JSON string into NSDictionary or NSArray object in 2 lines of code. But, it maybe slower.
I'm not sure there are really any special considerations. The iPhone should be able to communicate with most types of webservice.
I worked on an iPhone app that communicated to a RESTful webservice written in Java.
I imagine it's pretty straightforward across the board - there are plenty of libraries for parsing/generating XML or JSON formatted messages, the iPhone can handle HTTP authentication, HTTPS, caching, etc.
It's just down to your iPhone developer to get it right :)
For SOAP based web services I strongly suggest that you try gSOAP. This library does not support Objective-C, however it supports C and C++ and is certainly the most complete open source project to access SOAP based web service; it also outperforms all of the other libraries.
For Objective-C you may want to try wsdl2objc, but I am not sure if it provides support for SSL/TLS (gSOAP does).
Finally, REST based web services are easily handled using ASIHTTPRequest.
I'm thinking about creating an application for the iPhone and Android that will need to access a common backend to retrieve account information. Can both access a web service over https? What other way would allow me to have one interface to the backend that is accessible by both?
They both work over http and https which is a common enough protocol. I would suggest you go with a RESTful web service so you expose your service via URI's like http://www.myservice.com/weather/zip/98007 which would return an XML blob that can be parsed by the client.
if you are starting from nothing, i'd definitely go with RESTful service that returns/accepts JSON... there are plenty of libraries for both platforms that will accept JSON and turn it into arrays and dictionaries.
I'd recommend using a RESTful web service backend, which is all standard HTTP and/or HTTPS. If you can use Ruby on Rails, its default scaffolding will get you about 99% of the way there and for the iPhone there is an open source project called ObjectiveResource that will automate your communication with this Rails backend. I haven't investigated yet what options are available on Android but since it is all simple HTTP it should be straightforward. I am not the maintainer of ObjectiveResource but I have contributed some code. You can check it out here:
http://iphoneonrails.com
One good approach I have seen used with other services is to write the backend in such a way that it can feed data back in different types - for Android an XML response is best, but for the iPhone sending back plist data is preferred (though it can also work with XML if required). In both cases it's easier to simply POST updates back to the server than to wrap an update in XML.
Both platforms should be able to use whatever form of authentication you wish to use, the iPhone I know supports all methods of HTTP authentication.