I've used React Native for about 2 months now and I've learned a lot already. Now I wanna know how to connect my app to a SQL database. I want to be able to log in, register and chat. I've already built the log in, register and chat screen but I just need one function that can communicate online with a database, I guess. This must be possible... If so, how? A quick answer would be highly appreciated!
Update: This question was asked simply because I didn't recognize some programming terms back then... If you are asking yourself the same thing, search for "RESTful API" and then your desired programming language.
Update
This question was initially asked bescause of my lack of knowledge with backend and general APIs (Look at the title, it's obvious). After one year plus (now), I'm selling my own services and products to other corporations, professionally.
What you're wanting is a web api. Essentially, you will build a web application that you can access over http. You will most likely want to use RESTful web calls. Your web application will then take those REST requests, access your database, operate on your data and return a data response (JSON or XML). Then your iOS app would receive that JSON response and do whatever it needs to with it.
You can build a REST API out of pretty much any server side language, so pick one you like or feel comfortable with and start there.
Related
I'm just starting iOS app development with Swift (and in general) and I'm looking to get some information on popular practices when creating apps that require communication over arbitrary networks (i.e. not necessarily on the same network). I tried searching this on google but the answers weren't entirely what I was looking for; hopefully somebody can point be in the right direction. I wouldn't mind paying for a service, but unfortunately I don't know the first thing about backends and don't want to end up overpaying for services that I don't need. For example, I found an API called Parse, but I think it has far too many features that wouldn't benefit my app. Here's the main premise of the app:
There are two versions of the app - one for Admins and one for Employees
The Admins have the ability to post notes to a central list of notes for the employees to see
The Employees can access this list and scroll through it to pick which one they want to open. After a certain number of time, the notes expire and are removed from the list automatically
It's as simple as that. There likely won't be too many notes getting sent at once, so a large database isn't needed. My questions are as follows:
Do I need a database to store the notes, or can I handle it in some other way?
How is communication generally handled? The only things I've come across are ways to communicate when you're on the same WiFi or Bluetooth, but I haven't seen anything outside of that. How does an app like GroupMe communicate to users?
This is more of a general question, but how can you tell if you need a backend or not? I'm still kinda confused on the interaction between the frontend and backend.
Any help for any of the questions is greatly appreciated. I feel as though I don't even know where to start with a project like this.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm just looking for a place to start, not code or any implementation.
It's as simple as that. There likely won't be too many notes getting sent at once, so a large database isn't needed. My questions are as follows:
Do I need a database to store the notes, or can I handle it in some other way?
Yes you need some kind of database. That could be something complex like MySQL or something simple like writing a txt file for each note to the disk, with the filename being the date of the note.
You could use a service like Parse or run your own PHP server and write the software yourself. Parse is cheaper for a small database, running your own PHP server is cheaper for a big one and it gives you more control.
(You don't have to use PHP, but that is the most popular language for these things and it's what I use).
How is communication generally handled? The only things I've come across are ways to communicate when you're on the same WiFi or Bluetooth, but I haven't seen anything outside of that. How does an app like GroupMe communicate to users?
Usually your the phone sends a HTTP POST request to the server with some text in JSON format in the body of the HTTP request.
The server then responds with more text in JSON format in the response.
On the phone you use NSURLSession to handle to do the network communication and NSJSONSerialization to encode/decode the content. On the server, there will be something equivalent available.
Usually there would be a username and password or some other authentication system in the HTTP POST JSON text that tells the server wether or not the user is allowed to do whatever they're trying to do.
All communication between the phone and the server must be encrypted using SSL to protect your users. Do your homework and make sure you get this part right before you deploy your app to the store.
Parse will handle all of that stuff for you, but it's good to at least understand what's going on.
This is more of a general question, but how can you tell if you need a backend or not? I'm still kinda confused on the interaction between the frontend and backend.
You know you need a backend if you want two devices to communicate without being on the same WiFi/Bluetooth network. This is a security feature that cell network carriers (and home broadband ISPs) enforce to prevent malicious activity.
Generally only a commercial internet connection (and commercial router) will allow anonymous incoming network packets to get through to a phone/computer connected via that internet connection. Consumer internet connections only allow traffic coming in from a known source (for example, if you ask Google for some data, the router will temporarily allow Google to send some data to you. But if Google just sends some data without a phone/computer in your home asking for it, then it will be rejected).
You should be able to take what I've written and do a bunch of research.
If you decide to go with writing your own system in PHP, it comes pre-installed with OS X (just has to be enabled) and you can access it by IP address from the phone as long as you're on the same IP address. That should get you started for testing/development purposes at least.
The only part you won't have is SSL. Starting in iOS 9 (it's almost here!) you will need to disable NSURLSession's built in check for SSL or else it won't let you connect to the test server.
Im new to iOS and new to SWIFT with no previous experience with Obj-C. But, Im not new to Ruby. I have a web based app on heroku and am beginning to learn SWIFT so I can build an iOS counterpart. I need to wrap my head around the bigger picture before I can get started and I can not figure out how these apps connect to databases.
Can an iOS app connect to an S3 database...and share that database with a website? Is there documentation on this process that I have over looked.
Connecting an iOS app to a public database would really be a bad idea - all server logic should be implemented on the client, and you would also need to hardcode database user name and password in your app.
A better way is to create a server app exposing a set of REST APIs and being responsible of dealing with the database. This way you can better control at server side what the app client is able to do on the database.
If you have an order entry app, for instance, you can create APIs to:
login
register
create an order
modify an order
add a contact
delete a contact
etc...
Some of the advantages are that:
in case you need to update the logic (but not the API interface), you just need to update the server, whereas in your scenario you'd need to release a new version of the mobile app
you control and limit how client apps access to the data (preventing for instance a user to access another user's orders)
if you want to develop the same app in another platform (android, ...), you reuse the same APIs
To get started, I'd suggest you to read the AFNetworking tutorial on raywenderlch.com, focused on a ios networking library, but talking about JSON, REST, remote APIs etc.
Next you have to choose a server side technology - the most popular nowadays is node.js - to get started you can read other tutorials on the same website:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/61078/write-simple-node-jsmongodb-web-service-ios-app
http://www.raywenderlich.com/61264/write-ios-app-uses-node-jsmongodb-web-service
if you don't want to use node.js and/or mongodb... the same architecture applies, just languages and technologies differ. Just transpose what you learn from there.
If you want to read about other languages to use at server side, just google for it - if you want to use ruby, try with ios rest api server ruby.
Note: I made no mention of swift because your question looks more like an architectural problem than a language specific problem. The tutorials I mentioned here use objective-c, once you've designed an architecture and chosen the language at server side, you can start looking into how to call REST API from swift.
I a thinking of creating an iPhone/iOS app that would include a feature where one user could create a list of words and then save them to their account on a server. Also (and this is very important), the user could share their list with other users by giving them permission.
So my question is, how can I go about creating such a server? For right now, I have a home computer (running Windows XP that just stores data for my music system) which I can use to host the server. I am also open to the use of other online storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox (I can't remember if Amazon does anything like that). However (and I know this may complicate things a bit), but at least for now, I want/need to stick with free services/options.
Just to recap, the key features that I am looking for are:
create users/accounts (on the server)
eventually I may [try] to incorporate the use of other services to log users in like with their email account, OpenId, etc.
the ability to access (log in to) the server (with credentials) from my app
the ability to send/receive data between the server and my app
the ability to share data between users
I know this is a lot to ask for, but if anyone has any suggestions or can get me going in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.
The basic setup would be as follows:
Backend: Database (MySQL), Web server (Apache), with server side scripting (PHP).
Client: iOS device with developed app.
Communication: use HTTP client/server model, communicating with something like JSON.
This is much the same setup as a web server, but instead of serving html/css/javascript etc the results will be JSON.
As far as implementing specifics such as login in, and sharing data between users, this is purely dependent on your implementation. This is not trivial, and not something that can be easily stated in a single post.
Hope this helps.
You could build your own webservice in PHP, Ruby or Python. If you do so I would recommend building a RESTful webservice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) and then use RestKit (http://restkit.org/) to handle the data in the iOS app. Especially RestKit's CoreData integration is nice in my opinion.
Another solution would be using a service like Parse (https://parse.com/products/data). The first million or so requests per month are free but after that it could get pricy. I personally have not tried it so I couldn't tell you if it is any good.
I currently develop an iOS app for a local business directory, and I use SQLite. This sadly means I must do several hours of data entry when new businesses are added and push the updated DB out, because the desktop site uses the Joomla CMS.
Obviously companies that provide directory services don't have to worry about such things. How do they do it? Core Data accompanied by a screen scraper?
PS. I apologise if this question is inappropriate to be asked on StackOverflow, I didn't know where else to ask.
Generally these companies have a client/server architecture where the data lives on a centralised server and the mobile apps pull the data through an exposed API over the internet.
To replicate this yourself, you would have a server with all the data and expose it through an API/web service (so you'd need to think about authentication and security) which your mobile app pulls from when it needs to update the database or just have the query sent to the web service and return the appropriate results so the database does not live on the iOS device itself. The downside to the first approach (updating the DB) is you'd need to wait for the DB to fully update before the user could use the application and the downside to the second approach is to make queries, the client would need an active internet connection.
The first thing you'd want to look at is if/how you can expose the data stored in the Joomla CMS through an API (XML/JSON?)
My question is not about FourSquare API and its functions, but about more simpler details that are not well explained on Foursquare API explanations. Thank you very much in advance if someone wants to help me with this doubts:
Foursquare API is a framework you can use to build applications for mobile devices, above of IOS and Android, so i can imagine that they have API for IOS (Objective-C) and Android (Java), right?
From API Doc: "Be sure to note that although API requests are against api.foursquare.com, OAuth token and authorization requests are against foursquare.com.". Does it mean that if i want to use FourSquare app, the users has to have an account on FourSquare?
From API Doc: "For example, if you write an iPhone application, every user who logs in with their foursquare account will be able to make up to 500 users/* requests and up to 500 venues/* requests, etc." I dont understand this sentence. Does it mean that for example, if you use an API method request like "checkins.add()", this method create two methods? one against api.foursquare.com to monitor the API limit requests, and another to your Web Application Server?
So as a question related to the third one, where do you have to store your database? is it stored on Foursquare cloud database because you are loggin there, or you have to create your own Web Service application with its own SQL database?
From API Doc: "All requests are simple GET or POST requests that return JSON or JSONP respones", so i can imagine that the Web Application Service should understand JSON. Well, my main question is, can i use Ruby on Rails to build the Web Application Service and Web Page frontend? I am seeing that there are some wrapps for RoR designed from third companies, but are not official and doesnt cover all the 2.0 API, just the ones they needed for their services.
If i want to create an app using FourSquare API, what do you advice me to use as a programming language/framework for the Web Service Application? the WSA that has to process the JSON requests and later store them on the database, interaction with users on the WebPage, etc.
i am so sorry if my questions are so simple, but i dont have any other place of this level of expertise.
thank you very very much in advance.
The API is REST/JSON based, which means that any language that can do an HTTP request and parse a string can be used. There are Java and iOS libraries available. But you could use just about anything - curl with bash would be a bit extreme but if that floats your boat...
For some of the APIs (search a venue, for example) you do not necessarily need a FourSquar OAuth user token. For others (like checkin) a FourSquare token is required. For any API calls that require a userid, your users will have to be FourSquare users and "trust" your application with their FourSquare data.
Only requests to FourSquare is counted. So if you do a single call to checkins.add() it counts as one call for the user that is doing the checkin. I wouldn't worry about the limits. As long as you're usage of the API is sensible they will not be a problem. And if they do become a problem and you're doing something extraordinarily cool, the folks at FourSquare might be sympathetic.
You have to create your own web server with your own database to store some information. The OAuth token is one. You probably want to cache venue information here for short periods as well.
Yes, your webapp will need to be able to understand JSON. Ruby has excellent JSON support - look for the json gem.
It is really difficult to suggest a language or framework without knowing what it is that you're trying to do. I wouldn't choose a framework based on the fact that you want to use FourSquare (anything will do) but rather on your experience and the unique features of your application. You mentioned RoR before - that would definitely work.