I'm in the middle of working on my first native application with networking and I have a question regarding the best way for interacting with remote storage. In a perfect world I'd like to do the following.
Prompt the user for login information from the iPhone.
Verify the users credentials and connect to a MYSQL database hosted by myself.
Parse MYSQL data into a table view.
Allow the user to add or update information in the database.
I've read some similar questions posted, maybe something's lost in translation, but the two most common means I've come across are.
Create a web service for handling these requests using SOAP/REST/JSON (no experience doing this, but would like to learn if it's a better implementation)
Write PHP scripts (enough experience to get by) that will grab data username/password/requests securely from my NSURLRequest and echo the NSData as XML and parse it with an NSXMLParser.
Are there other options? Is one a better implementation over the other? (web services come up more in searches)
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read my question and possibly clearing up any confusion.
Whoa! Web Services! Oh wait, calling a PHP script that returns JSON is actually also a web service. Well, that makes things simpler :-)
Yeah, so I would go for this:
Write a PHP script that returns JSON data (many tutorials available)
Protect the PHP script by setting up 'Basic access authentication' (Apache documentation)
Tell Apache to take the user database from your mysql database
Run your service on secure (HTTPS) web server (important because basic auth is not secure)
This way you can use almost all standard components on the iPhone side. NSURLConnection will talk HTTP(S) and there are excellent open source JSON parsers for Objective-C.
Related
I'm about to start an iOS project that requires pulling user's data from an SQL Database and viewing it within the App. Before I begin I'm looking for conformation that I'm taking the right (best) route.
My Plan:
App starts on login page (app will display data from another service)
App uses AFNetworking to post request to web service
Web service gets user data from SQL Database and sends back JSON
App uses JSONKit to parse the feed and load into Core-Data
App uses info from core-data to populate UI
Does this seem like an appropriate way to get the info into Core-Data from SQL? Any suggestions for doing things differently?
Thanks.
Are you receiving the response from the web server in JSON? If so, the fact that the server is using an SQL database is immaterial. What you need to know is how to parse JSON for inclusion in a core data store. Cocoa is my Girlfriend has a pretty good tutorial up.
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To answer your comment, here's what I've done.
Display a login screen. The login credentials should be stored in the keychain for security. I've used SSKeychain for this.
To handle sending and receiving data from a web request your best option is to use a pre-built library. I've always used ASIHTTPRequest, but since it is no longer under active development, you should probably look around a bit before you commit to anything. I'm sure there are nicer and cleaner libraries out there.
You need to parse the JSON responses. I'm a fan of JSONKit. It's very fast, very easy to use, very robust.
Pulling data out of the core data store and displaying it in the interface will be no problem for you. If you create a new project in Xcode most of the setup will be done for you.
Now, there are a lot of projects out there that attempt to combine web requests, json parsing and core data loading into one framework. I've tried to use a few of these and haven't had much luck. The ones I've tried haven't been robust and very difficult to debug. Setting up your own request/parse/load code is not difficult at all, just a bit time consuming.
I am sure that there are a lot os ways to make implement this problem. Your solution is one of the popular solutions I guess but you could connect to the DB via a socket and talk with the database directly e.g. Going over a port 80 web site has the advantage that the possibility of some kind of firewall blocking the communication is very low. I would solve this kind of problem the same way I guess.
My App needs to connect to and grab data from a MySQL database sitting on a server. I've successfully interfaced with local SQLITE databases in my Apps, but this is the first time I've had to interface with a remote MySQL database.
I understand this process involves:
1) the iPhone App sending this request to the server
2) some sort of API gets executed and it does the actual "talking" to the Database on the server, and then it returns the query results as XML (or JSON.)
3) the iPhone then parses the returned information and uses it however it needs to.
What I need help with is step # 2 - the API. I don't know PHP, I don't know PERL - do I really have to learn one of these just to write an API? I thought that this iphone-to-remote-MySQL task would be so commonplace that such API's would already be out there, available freely - but I'm not really seeing anything.
I know Objective-C really well - but should I be using XML or JSON for this? Should I be learning PERL or PHP?
any tips or advice would be highly appreciated.
It's hard to give you a definite answer without knowing more precisely what you are looking at, but it sounds like your web service/API part should be quite light. In this case, it should be quite easy to write it in any language. If you know Objective-C well, it should be very easy to pick up some PHP or Ruby.
You mention PHP and Perl. The good thing I see with PHP is that it's available on any hosting service. For instance, with PHP you can make MySQL queries in a few lines of code.
Otherwise, if the web service lives on a machine that you own or if you have more flexibility, it might be easier to write something using Ruby and a small framework like Sinatra.
Regarding using XML or JSON to serialize the data, this will depend on what type of data your API returns. Generally, JSON will be much simpler and the support is good on both side:
- With Ruby, you can see how easy it is to use JSON here: http://flori.github.com/json/
- With Objective-C, you would use NSJSONSerialization available starting with iOS5.
Well you can talk to remote MySQL server using Objective C client directly from iphone
as show here
I want the way with the fastest execution time. I'm not feeling comfortable of using web service because i need to create separate php pages and retrieve data as xml. If you think its good to use web service please tell me why. I want to code my database queries right on my c/objective c pages.
I've been searching for libraries. I saw this sequel pro - won't i have any problems on using this - like licensing issues? I also saw this libmysqlclient of cocoa but some say its not working well. I've also read about a library developed by Karl Kraft found here http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2010/06/02/mysql-and-objective-c/ but don't know if i could trust this.
I would really appreciate you help.
Definitely build a web service to act as an abstraction layer to your database. Here are some significant reasons in my opinion:
Since you want speed, you will be able to add caching when using the webservice, so you will essentially eliminate the need for identical queries to run (sometimes).
If you need to change your data model later, you just have to modify the webservice backend and don't have to update your app.
You can better control security by not exposing the database to the world, and keep it safe behind the web service.
Your database credentials should not be stored in an app. What if you needed to change those?
I strongly suggest a web service. Hope this helps.
Connect to your DB by PHP and output the result as JSON
is much better and faster then xml and less coding if use JSON Framework.
and never never try to connect to your DB from your iphone because it easy to sniff out the request from iphone.
Being safe then Sorry, keep that in mind
I am a beginner at both iPhone programming and SQL, yet I have basic knowledge of them.
I am planning to do an application that would plot a graph from data taken from a database of the server of my company. I know how to plot, I know how to extract data from an sql table, but what I don't know is how to access the server.
So do I have to go through some kind of oracle-like application ?
This may seem like a very stupid question because it might not even be possible but any answer will be appreciated.
Thanks !
Go through a web service for example a PHP page that returns JSON (or XML, but JSON is easier to parse).
I can highly recommend this tutorial
Once you have your web service, you can use NSURLRequest/NSURLConnection to download the data and use a JSON framework to parse it. Or, if you're using XML you can use NSXMLParser.
See this apple code for more info on downloading using NSURLConnection.
The best way for this will be, using APIs at server end that handle the client request and perform database interaction, so transfer of data among device and server, take place through XMLs that will be secure as well as fast.
It is definitely possible to contact a server (I can't imagine what would happen without that!). What you are looking for is NSURLConnection. Have a look at the example provided by Apple.
I'm writing a game for iPhone, and I want an online leaderboard using mySQL, which i'm very familiar with.
How do I implement this in my app?
I would assume there's a framework/library i need to obtain?
You don't.
You most certainly DO NOT want to expose and publish your database connection to the "live" internet. That's simply folly.
The database listeners simply aren't designed to work over such an unrestricted domain. They tend to live sheltered lives.
Instead, you should front your database with another service that IS designed for the wilds of the internet. This service can handle the authentication, encryption, load balancing, etc. requirements that good internet servers support.
Most folks today use some variant of web service, posting XML or JSON, but you can do whatever you want.
But don't open the DB connection to the live internet. You're just asking for trouble.
You should abstract the DB technology from the app, wrap your MySQL DB with a simple web service and run it on a web server, then you can use standard HTTP requests to interact with your database from your app.
My suggestions (not by any means the only way to do this)...
Use Django (or some other simple web framework) to wrap your database model, you can ever have django generate the code from your existing DB schema.
Write a few basic views to modify your DB using basic HTTP POST calls and send the username and score data in the POST data
Write a few simple pages that return the data you want in an XML format that you app can parse and display however you want, these are essentially just very simple generated web pages.
Now you have a publicly accessible leaderboard server that your app can interface with by posting scores and retrieving data through simple socket HTTP calls.
This may be outside your scope, but have you considered using OpenFeint instead to do Leaderboards and more? There's no actual framework/library from Apple to create a leaderboard in GameKit. You have to write one yourself from scratch. Although, using the OpenFeint library would give you all this for you, but that's if you want to use it.
More information here on a tutorial to do just what you're asking.
http://icodeblog.com/2009/10/29/iphone-coding-tutorial-creating-an-online-leaderboard-for-your-games/