Sending data to a server for computation - iphone

I want to create an application which will will be a webapp. I want to collect the data from the user, send it to a server where the computation will take place, and have the result displayed on the iPhone screen. The server normally takes results from a regular webpage via text fields and computes it and displays the result on the webpage. I just want the send the data via iPhone. Navigating my iPhone safari to the webpage is NOT an option, as the webpage is not optimized. So I how do I send data to the server, make it compute the results and have the results displayed on my iPhone?
Thank you.
Regards
EDIT:
I have no control over the server. Imagine my case to be as follows: The user enters a word, the word is sent by the iPhone to a Google server, the server compiles the search results and sends it back to my iPhone, and then the iPhone displays this result on the screen.Any more suggestions?

You might consider using ASIHTTPRequest/ASIFormDataRequest if you want to submit form data to your existing web page using form fields (per your description.)
In general I find ASIHTTPRequest friendlier to use than NSURLConnection / NSURLRequest.
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/

The most straightforward way is to use NSMutableURLRequest to create the GET or POST request, and then NSURLConnection to (asynchronously) send the data and receive the result. You could also use any number of third-party libraries to do the same thing.
As for the server side of things, you would have it accept a GET or POST just as you would with a web-based app, and output data in an appropriate format.
As for the output format that will be parsed by your app: With the standard classes, you can easily parse plist data and (with a little more work) XML; third-party libraries can be found to parse json and many other formats, if you so desire.

Related

GWT upload - Uploading single file twice

I am currently working on a GWT screen which has a requirement of browsing GWT file once but submitting it to server many times.
But in GWT upload after clicking on submit. or even submitting using singleUploader.submit() method. File browsed by FileInputType get cleared.
Can you suggest any method to upload single file many times using gwt-upload?
Not sure if it is possible. I would try to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest/Using_XMLHttpRequest
and would create (using native javascript) two instances of XmlHttpRequest and would try to send them both.
The anticipated problem here is that input element on the page would receive incoming events as a result of the upload process (loadstart, progress, etc). I am in doubt that it can properly handle two parallel flows of those events successfully.
Another way is to try to send the upload requests consequently, but then you will have to generate second form submit. Which is not trivial, and browsers do not support that on the high level.

Flex mobile project for IOS, server side proxy

I am trying to write an iphone app that loads a video from an inbuilt web server running off a camera (connect to iphone via wifi).
I am using flash builder / flex mobile project - not particularly familiar but finding it easier to understand than xcode !!
The files from the camera have the wrong file extension so will not play on the ios video app, can I set up a server side proxy in flex mobile and use this to alter the file extension and then pass this link to the ios video app ?
If so any help anybody could give me ( examples etc) would be really grateful received , I have been trying to get round this problem for a couple of weeks .
Cheers
Toby
I can explain, conceptually, what a server side proxy would do in this case. Let's say you are retrieving a URL, like this:
http://myserver.com/somethingSomething/DarkSide/
to retrieve a video stream from the server. You say it won't be played because there is no file extension; so you have to, in essence, use a different URL with the extension. Set up 'search engine friendly' URLs on the server. And do something like this:
http://myserver.com/myProxy.cfm/streamURL/somethingSomething%5CDarkSide/Name/myProxyVid.mp4
Here is some information on how to deal with Search Engine Friendly URLs in ColdFusion. Here is some information on how to deal with Search Engine Friendly URls in PHP. I'm sure Other technologies will come up in a Google Search.
In the URL above; this is what you have:
http://myserver.com/: This is your server
myProxy.cfm: This is your server side file; that is a proxy
streamURL/somethingSomething%5CDarkSide/Name/myProxyVid.mp4: This is the query string. It consists of two name value pairs. The first is the streamURL. This is the URL you want to retrieve with your proxy. The second is just random; but as long as it ends with the file extension .mp4 the URL should be seen as an 'mp4 file'
The code behind your myProxy.cfm should be something like this, in psuedo-code:
Parse URL Query String
Retrieve Stream.
Set mimeType on return value.
Return stream data
I used a similar approach on TheFlexShow.com to track the number of people who watch our screencast on-line vs downloading it first. I also used the same approach to keep track of impressions of advertiser's banner ads. For example, the browser can't tell that this is not a JPG image:
http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/mediaDisplay.cfm?mediaid=51
Based on this, and one of your previous questions; I am not convinced this is the best solution, though. I make a lot of assumptions here. I assume that the problem with playing the file does relate to the extension and not the file data. I assume that you are not actually streaming video with an open connection on both client and server to send data back and forth.

Getting the progress of the sent data through Zend Rest service

I have the following situation. We are using Zend Framework to create a web application that is communicating with it's database through REST services.
The problem I'm facing is that when a user tries to upload a big video file for example, the service is taking some time (sometimes a few minutes) to receive the request (which is also sending the video file encoded with base64_encode PHP function.) and returns the response for successful save or error.
My idea is to track how much of the data is sent and show the user a JS progress bar, which will be useful in these cases.
Does anyone have an idea, how I can track how much of the data is sent through the service and based on this I'll be able to show a progress bar?
Zend provides progress bar functionalities that might be paired with some javascript/jquery client.
You will easily find some example implementations like this one:
https://github.com/marcinwol/zfupload
However I don't think that REST services are the best solution for uploading videos as base64 encoding will make files bigger and slower to upload.
Check out Zend_File_Transfer that might be better suited to your needs:
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.file.transfer.introduction.html

constructing xml within ios app

I am sending a request back to the server I am communicating with, the gist of this request will have a bunch of different parameters, like user ID, request number etc.
One of the more important parts of the request is a segment of XML that im hoping to create based of a few user selections in my interface.
Then at the end i will wrap this all up and send it off to the server...
However at the moment I have no idea how to form an segment xml, I have been reading this but im not sure how it relates to what I would like to do.
any help, example code, example tutorials or anything would be really helpful.
A plist is just xml with a strict dtd; and you can use NSPropertyListSerialization to create one to send back to the server from an NSArray/NSDictionary, very easily.

How to get data from MySQL generated XML?

I have an app to send data from iPhone to MySQL server and I got it with request from objective-c and php on server.
Now, I want to receive data from server by XML. I have created a php code to generate data from MySQL to XML. How can I code in objective-c to call this php code? The goal is using this XML to parse and display on iPhone (I have objective-c code to parse xml file from link on server).
Please help me if you know and used to work on that.
Use Web-servces Like XML- RPC, SOAP ,REST
To connect to a mysql database, your best bet is to use JSON/SOAP/XML/PHP or some combo of the mentioned, to talk between your database and your app..
The reason database connection directly from the device is a bad idea, is that you have to enable global external access to it for it to work. You can keep your data safer by having scripts on your server do the communication to the database.
Your server needs to expose a service of some kind (a URL the iPhone app can call).
Your app can call this URL with NSURLConnection (or lots of others).
This will return you an NSData * object.
Your app will then need to parse this raw data into XML (or JSON or a few others). You can use NSXMLParser (and lots of others) to do the parsing.
Then, you need to translate the XML into useful business objects.