We're investigating the iPhone Enterprise Developer Program as a way to develop and distribute in-house apps. Since our backends are all Windows, SQL server and Oracle databases, we have to find out a way to make our data available for the coming in-house apps.
As far as I know that Core Data is mainly based on SQLite as persistent store. I am not sure if there are any APIs available in iPhone SDK for SQL server or Oracle database? Another possibility, or very attractive strategy, is to build our own web-based REST services as CRUD gateway to our databases.
Personally, I prefer to integrate in-house apps with our ASP.NET based web services. I am not sure if this is possible. Are there any examples or documentations about this strategy?
an interesting option is to expose your data from your server using asp.net OData then use this project to generate a client in objective-C to consume your OData service.
As far as I am aware there are no approved API's to access a server based database. The way we do it in our organisation is pretty much the way you are suggesting. In some instances we are using SOAP but typically we just use a custom JSON or XML web service to access the data.
With regards to ASP.NET are you talking about making native iPhone Apps with ASP.NET or getting a native iPhone App to talk to an ASP.NET web service? If its the first then have a look at monotouch (don't know much about it), if its the later then this shouldn't cause issues. Just use NSURLConnection and deal with the resource structure on the App (be it JSON or XML).
The added advantage of using a web service rather than a straight database connection is that you get encryption for free using https.
Hope that helps
There's a product called SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform), it provides a framework to handle access to databases but has the advantage that there doesn't need to be an online access all the time, it stores persistent data locally and then can sync up with the host database using messaging.
Related
We're developing REST API using Web API for a mobile client.
There is a special need to keep user specific data on server side (expensive DAL requests).
What is the best practice to do that?
The naive way is to keep the data in the Application's memory.
Considering security issues, we're thinking of using ASP.NET Session.
What would you recommend?
3rd party cloud solution is not an option.
Thanks!
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
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.
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