I'm new to iOS programming and am starting my first project. I'm wondering how clients manage the content (blogs, videos, etc) on their apps after you deliver the final product. Is their a content management system I should be implementing or do the developers usually handle that?
A developer would build it from scratch. An alternative to starting from the ground up would be to use CloudKit or some other NoSQL based web service to manage the content. Couchdb, Firebase, etc...
A client might add content in several ways. One could create a simple web form that allows a client to edit the content (empty form to add, a table with a link to edit or delete). If the client has a developer account you could add their Apple ID as a role to the CloudKit database with specific security rights to edit that database. Similar activities would apply to other platforms.
Related
I have a project and i want my ASP.Net to be able to have same capabilities like windows insider. For example i want to give some of the users the new features and functionality to test same like share point allows to deploy new feature to some of the users. Is there any platform available that i can use or i will have to modify my application to have this capability?
E.g. the Sharepoint today has this capability that we can select some users and then provide them access to have new feature and version or outlook allows you to see new features but user has capability to turn it of.
There is one strategy:
You can do something like request forwarding.
You can install another web application with new features.
Then when user comes to your site you can ask them whether they want to see old application / new application.
If they select new, then on server side, you can redirect user to new web setup.
Once you aware that most of the people are going to new web tier, you can then shutdown old servers.
Obviously there will be other factors, like
is this only UI level change or you have some data store and that is
also going to change.
If it requires change in underlying database, then how are you going
to make sure that new application gets data from old database
You will have to think through and decide strategy best applicable for your solution.
I know this does not provide direct solution to your question, but this should given enough information on your question so that you can get started with some approach.
One option is to use an Authorize Attribute on a new controller defined for the new feature and add users who you want to have access to a role.
For example you could put users A, B and C into the Role "CanUseNewFeature" and just put a conditional if on the view something like:
#if(User.IsInRole("CanUseNewFeature")
<a href="yourlink" /> Check out new feature! </a>
and the controller
[Authorise(Roles ="CanUseNewFeature")]
public class NewFeatureController : Controller
I built an in-house app for selling tickets and checking-in students to our High School dances. At the moment the app can scan a QR code with the student's information and add their name to either a "Sales" list or "Check In" list. Then the app can export these lists to a CSV file and we compile all the data.
App works perfectly as expected. NOW I want to be able to sync data between multiple devices so that every device will see an up to date Sales and Check in list. The check in list is most important because then our faculty chaperones can all see who has arrived to the dance in real time. I figured I would need to build a server to hold all the data as opposed to on the individual devices like I am doing now (CoreData). Can anyone please give me guidance or advice as to where to go from here? I am using Swift and developing for iOS 10.
I would just answer the general approach to tackle this problem since the implementations would largely be depending on many factors (what database technology is available, the platform of the server, etc.)
You are absolutely right, you need a server to hold the data. Technically speaking, it is a database that holding the data. Thus, you need a database running on your server (there are tons of selections here: Maria DB, SQL Server, Mongo DB, etc.).
Next, you need to build a web service on top of the database so that the iOS app can interact with the database (add/delete/update/read rows). Web service is a very common layer in full-stack application since you normally don't access the database directly.
Finally, you need to guard your web service with some sort of authentication. I.e. you don't want any random person out there to be able to access your web service without permission. There are many implementations out there to secure your web service and you should be able to google that easily.
Firebase might be the easiest solution. Its pretty simple to setup, and its pretty simple to set up data persistence when you go off line. I'm big on trying to stick with the built in Apple services, but Firebase is hard to beat for simple apps.
Take a look at CloudKit, or perhaps Firebase or Azure, as services that will provide a back end server for you, and give you a tested SDK to build against.
Context/Background: I have an iOS app with a Firebase backend. Each user on the app has a couple of public stories or journals. I am working on the v2 of the app and one of the main features of v2 is to give users the ability to publish their stories as static webpages by a click of a button. The goal is to have a journal for a user with a username "johnhouse", for example, be available at www.the-app-domain.com/johnhouse.
Question: How do can I create web pages on the fly from an iOS app? Im not sure where to start. Which online services should I look at?
I thought of spinning up a server and hosting www.the-app-domain.com on it, getting the app to ssh into the server and creating a directory called "johnhouse" (from the example above) inside the website's root directory and then pasting an index.html file inside it, But this doesn't only sound like a bad idea, it also sounds complicated as hell If I were to generate the html files on the app, how would I get them to the server? how would I get them into the right location?
There are a great many ways you might implement this behavior but I'll suggest one.
Consider what this product might look like if the app had no knowledge of how these static pages were published. All the app needs to be able to do is allow users to set which of their stories are published or not and to inform those users of the url at which their published stories will be available.
There may be real advantages to removing the app from your page-creation process.
If you find that you need to make change to the formatting of your pages you can do so without requiring an app update and you can choose if you want to rebuild every page or just have changes apply to new pages. This might be important if you discover that your pages don't render well on some devices or are not indexed the way you would like by search engines.
If you need to change where your pages are hosted you can do so (and provide redirects from the old location) without needing everyone to update to a new app version.
If you need to add moderation or curation of the content you publish you can do so more easily than if clients (your app) have direct control of your site content. This may be important when someone starts publishing SEO spam links to your site, or registers the username admin or login, or publishes a story containing malicious javascript, or publishes content which gets you a copyright infringement notice.
You don't need to give clients direct access to your web server which could allow them to edit each other's content or overwrite your site with their own malicious content.
Since you're already using Firebase take a look at how you might run your own web server as another client of this backend. One which looks for "published" stories (however you identify those in your data model) and generates appropriate pages for them. Depending on the tools you elect to use these could be dynamically generated pages (client side js or a web app) or static pages build by some backend process periodically or whenever stories change and added to a web server. Without any idea what server side tools would be most appropriate for you it's hard to know what specifically to suggest here.
I had developed 3 applications for my client. Now he wants to distribute it to other organizations (doing same business). Other firms will have minor data and image set changes, other functionalities are same. What is the best approach for distributing this 3 application with the other firms?
1) One solution I think is to upload this 3 application to each firms apple enterprise account.
Prons:
UI and functionality can be changed for each apps depends on business
changes.
Will have different server and APIs. So data security can be increased.
Cons:
Need to maintain different source codes.
As firms number increases applications also increases, which can be a form of spamming appStore
with similar applications.
2) Another solution is to upload this 3 application to one account and is distributed among other firms. Need to check any legal issue in doing this. By this server will maintain different database for different Companies and user registered with this company will link to the corresponding database. All other calculation and logic will be handled by the server. iOS application switches image set w.r.t company.
Can I do this by any other approach or which one is the best one. The main idea is to give a contract to another firm by creating a set of users having an extendable validity date and this is maintained by my client.
Thanks in advance and any thought on this is appreciable.
The best solution to this is Volume Purchase Program for Business
provided by Apple. It provides you with a functionality called Custom B2B apps for iOS. You can read the details in this document.
In essence, I'm building a private journaling app for iOS using Swift that will have a social feature. When creating a new entry, the user can choose to share the entry with specified friends from a friends list. The friend will receive a notification of the new entry, and it will be added to their own journal. The friend can later choose to accept or deny addition of the entry from their personal journal after review. Users won't be able to see each other's journals, they will only be able to share(add) entries to their friend's journals.
While I'd prefer to use iCloud, CloudKit won't allow me to share the entry records between users if I store them in a private database, and the information will be too sensitive to plop into the public database. CKRecordZones would be helpful, but they are only available for organizing a private database, so they will do me no good with sharing entries.
Can the privatized entry sharing I want be accomplished through Parse or perhaps another service I'm unaware of? Or will I have to build a custom backend to accomplish this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!
I think below links can solve your problem:
iOS 8 data sharing between users
How to share Core Data between multiple users?
ios share data between users
Read all 3 questions and right answers of them.
CloudKit would be the easiest when you are ok with limiting it to Apple devices only. If you wan tot make a quick start with that, then try out EVCloudKitDao
Until now the logical choice for this kind of apps was Parse. It's easy to implement and has a lot of features.
Amazon just released a new AWS Mobile Hub that looks very promising. It integrates with all AWS services, is very powerful and now also easy to use.
You could also use Microsoft Azure Mobile Service. It looks like it has similar features as AWS.
Of course there are more less known environments that also might work in your case but I think it would be wiser to stay with one of the above 4 well known choices.
Which of these you should pick is more or less a personal choice. They can all do what you want. If it's the best use for you depends on your use case.