is there any open source code for syncing an iPhone
with a server (preferably REST)?
Found nothing on github and google code.
Regards...
I have been working with a project called ObjectiveResource (Github project here: http://github.com/yfactorial/objectiveresource/tree/master), which is focused mainly on the communication layer between your iphone models and a REST based web service. It is targeted at rails applications but should work with any REST api. Part of that project is a more sync oriented solution that is still in early development, but which has been discussed quite a bit lately in the objective resource google group at http://groups.google.com/group/objectiveresource?hl=en.
I highly recommend objective resource, I've been using it along with sqlitepersistenobjects to handle sync on my iphone project.
I suggest using the excellent ASIHTTPRequest source from All-Seeing Interactive: http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest. I'm doing this, and so are several released iPhone apps, so you can be sure the code is pretty solid.
This is a wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is written in Objective-C and works in both Mac OS X and iPhone applications.
It is suitable for performing basic HTTP requests and interacting with REST-based services (GET / POST / PUT / DELETE). The ASIFormDataRequest subclass makes it easy to submit POST data and files using multipart/form-data.
I've used Adrian Kosmaczewski's iPhone Rest Wrapper with success. See also this SO question.
I would recommend checking out RestKit: http://restkit.org/ It provides an excellent API for accessing RESTful web services and representing the remote resources as local objects, including persisting them to Core Data.
Related
Is there a general Cocoa or Cocoa Touch library for interacting with any web service API, or one which can be used as a basis for creating my own library for a web service? For example, I could add some details about how to interact with the Vimeo API (how to verify user details, what URLs to call). I'm not sure how this would work in reality.
If not, can anyone suggest an web service library which I could alter to change the API calls? It would need to be fairly simple (a small API) and easy to adapt. An example is this Cocoa library for Twitter (although it would probably be too complicated to adapt). Would it be easier just to code it up from scratch?
I don't think there is a library that will automagically work with any web API. In fact I don't even think it's possible to write such a library, since you can define your web API any way you want to. That library would have to be pretty smart in order to figure out how to use an arbitrary API.
I think the closest you'll get is something like ASIHTTPRequest, which is a great library for interacting with web services. If you add a JSON and/or XML parser you'll have everything you need to interact with almost any web API.
Found another library for interacting with RESTful web services. It's called RestKit. From their description:
RestKit is a Cocoa framework for interacting with RESTful web services in Objective C on iOS and Mac OS X. It provides a set of primitives for interacting with web services wrapping GET, POST, PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs behind a clean, simple interface. RestKit also provides a system for modeling remote resources by mapping them from JSON (or XML) payloads back into local domain objects. Object mapping functions with normal NSObject derived classes with properties. There is also an object mapping implementation included that provides a Core Data backed store for persisting objects loaded from the web.
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'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
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 want to call some RESTful web services from a J2ME client running on a MIDP enabled mobile device. I read the MIDP api for HTTPConnections and thought this is just crying out for a simple wrapper to hide all those unpleasant byte arrays and such like. Before I write my own I wondered whether there was a good open source library already available.
-FE-
You might want to check out this little gem, Mobile Ajax for Java ME:
https://meapplicationdevelopers.java.net/mobileajax.html
One part is (from the site):
Asynchronous I/O for Java ME
This library provides the equivalent
of XmlHttpRequest for Java ME with
some additional functionality useful
for invoking RESTful web services.
It is layered on top of the
com.sun.me.web.path library. Features
include -
* Asynchronous versions of HTTP Get and Post
* HTTP Basic Authentication
* Multipart MIME (sender only)
* Progress listeners
LWUIT 1.5 now includes classes for accessing REST, using OAuth2, JSON, etc.
I don't know of any such library, but found some succinct examples of accessing various RESTful web services
We ended up writing our own simple wrapper api for a variety of reasons not the least of which was the fact that the Sony Ericsson K750 that we were developing for had a weird bug (that SE refused to fix) where if you tried to get/use a connection when the device was off network, more than about 20 times, the internal connection pool would get hosed and never recover unless you restarted the app.