Comments on: iPhone – Tips for building great server/client apps

By: Peter Moss

Peter Moss — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:30:06 +0000

Good points. It is always good idea to keep the network payload to a minimum. Delta updates can be incorporated into design of your web service.

.Net can be bloody fat, or as thin as you like. It all depends who is coding it, I guess.

Peter

By: ken wong

ken wong — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:18:39 +0000

Great post, look forward to your post for using .net to add/edit/get data, thanks

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:19:24 +0000

Great post, thanks very much for taking the time to write it.
I was wondering whether you could tell me anymore about what you said in the above reply (“Forms based authentiction is also possible as the SDK supports cookies aswell”) Do you have any examples of this. I would really like to use this approach but wouldn’t know where to start.

Thanks

Sam

By: Björn Sållarp

Björn Sållarp — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:26:42 +0000

@Laurent
Which authentication scheme to use depend on how your users are stored and what kind of authentication you are currently using (if any). The iPhone does support SSL and posting data is not a problem, look at NSMutableRequest.

You could use Basic Authentication and pass the credentials directly in your request but unfotunately there SDK doesn’t support Base64 encoding.
Forms based authentiction is also possible as the SDK supports cookies aswell.
If you’re starting out fresh, ie. no existing users, you could create your own authentication aswell. If you’re only calling two webservice methods you could simply pass the credentials in every method call.

At first I was very confused with the syntax aswell. In fact, I still find it rather stupid/cumbersome. The poor intellisense support in Xcode doesn’t help either. It took a while for me to find out that the escape key brings up a list of methods for an object.
I read the first chapters oc the book: Cocoa Programming For MAC OS X by Aaron Hillegass, that really helped and after that it was just to keep going at it and reading the API reference. Install the API reference in Xcode so you can look up objects directly instead of searching google.

Good luck with your app! Use Core Data, it will simplify your implementation

By: Björn Sållarp

Björn Sållarp — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:08:53 +0000

For those interested in using JSON here’s a good tutorial on that:
http://iphonedevelopertips.com/cocoa/json-framework-for-iphone-part-2.html

By: Ries

Ries — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:52:20 +0000

Much easer on the iPhone is to use json rather then using XML.
There is a great Lin that can take a json string into NSDictionaries.

Ties

By: Laurent

Laurent — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:45:32 +0000

Thanks for this article, it’s really helpful. I’m trying to create an iPhone application consuming a .net web service. This iPhone app should retain data in a Sqlite database, and i’m also considering using Core Data. My question is : how would you handle authentication with the web server without using SOAP (GET is a bad idea in that case) ? I think it is secure enough to send the auth data in POST with a SSL certificate, but does the iPhone SDK support it ?
I have another question, more general : how did you learn Objective C with your .NET background ? Personnaly I’m really confused about the syntax… what were your most precious resources in your learning process ?

Thanks in advance for your answers

By: Björn Sållarp

Björn Sållarp — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:44:21 +0000

Hey FF, thanks for your feedback!

I’ve thought about a sample application that use a .NET web service to read/add data. Perhaps a little later this year, I’m too busy at the moment with other projects.

By: FF

FF — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:21:03 +0000

Thanks for two great articles. Maybe you could combine them into one? For example create a server side application (java/.net) that returns xml and is read by the ihpone app and stored locally? When an updated/new city is created on the server, a new xml i created and read by the iphone.

Thanks again!