Jack Cox

Oct 05 2011

Example: Managing Complex Network Calls From an iPhone

Introduction

In this blog article I follow-up a previous article on Managing Complex Mobile Transactions with a simple working example written in Objective-C for the iPhone. 

The previous article describes a pattern for managing the complex error conditions that may occur.  This article provides an example of calling an authenticated service from YouTube.  In this type of communication there are a number of failure modes that need to be considered. 

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Tagged: iphone, mobile, REST

Sep 17 2011

SOAP vs. REST For Mobile Services

Abstract

Many enterprises are creating mobile applications for their internal staff, for their customers, or both.  These applications need access to data, business rules, and business processes.  For architectural and security reasons these applications are typically built to access remotes services that provide the data and functionality that are required by the users. 

Because many web applications have been built over the last decade using SOAP-based web services, many architects have made the assumption that these same SOAP-based services are the best choice for mobile applications.  We believe that the use of RESTful services, with data in JSON format is a better choice for mobile applications whether the client device technology is iOS, Android, Blackberry, or even Mobile Web.

In this white paper we look at the differences between SOAP and REST for use by mobile applications, analyze typical assumptions about them, and offer an a

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Sep 08 2011

Managing Complex Mobile Transactions

Problem statement 

Network communications from an iOS device are easy, but handling errors on those connections is not. As an app developer I like to see results quickly and leave the edge condition details till later so I quickly wire in network operations and plan on handling all of the error conditions later. For web applications I can usually get away with this approach because the network connectivity from a stationary laptop is mostly reliable.  In a mobile app this approach will get me in trouble. When I do get around to adding exception handling routines I end up in a situation where I need to refactor my network code significantly or hack in less than optimal approaches to handle exceptions. 

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Tagged: iOS, iphone, mobile

Jan 28 2010

What's New For iPhone Developers on the iPad

With the release of the Apple iPad and the associated iPhone SDK 3.2 there are a number of new features of the SDK.  This article provides a high level overview of those features.  At the current time, iPhone OS 3.2 is only available on the iPad, iPhone developers will have to wait for these features..

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Tagged: iphone, mobile

Nov 24 2009

Tutorial: Simple iPhone Rest Client

Introduction

This article follows previous articles on components for a RESTful iPhone application and an example RESTful service using Jersey (http://blogs.captechventures.com/blog/jack-cox/implementing-iphone-friendly-rest-service-jersey-spring-and-jaxb). This article walks through the iPhone application to display the data provided by the REST service.

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Tagged: iphone, mobile, REST

 

Disclaimer

The words and opinions expressed here are those of each article's respective author, and do not necessarily represent the views of CapTech Ventures.