Native iOS Oracle Database Connection - ios

I am currently developing a native iOS (from 8.0 in swift) application for a customer of my company. One of his requirements is that the mobile application have to connect directly to a remote oracle database (11g 2.0.3). Yes, I know this is a really really bad idea and we should not do that, but our customer explicitly wants this and doesn't want any additional infrastructure.
So please don't advise me to do this over an approriate web service.
I already seeked through the Internet several times to find a suitable solution. There appears to be a ODBC driver ODBCRouter, but as far as I could see, this driver is really really really outdated and won't be fit in my project. Even the native web services introduced in oracle 11g do not appear to be a viable solution for our customer.
We also have experience in Xamarin but even there seems to be no solution for my problem. I tried to install the Official Oracle ODP.NET Managed Driver NuGet package, but that doesn't work because of the iOS target.
I would be most pleased if anyone has an idea and can help me :)

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IOS Continuous Updates for XCFramework

I am building a XCFramework for my company and the primary purpose is to expose our data for clients using this Framework. Clients can access data using this Framework through use-cases without knowing the implementation details.
This Framework needs a very high run-time maintenance support as we may have to add or update the use-cases based on clients requests or changing busing requirements. It's very important to design an automated solution to deploy new changes and make the updated Framework available for clients. I'm looking to host SDK somewhere so I can build and deploy it. Something like maven for Android. But I've not found some good solution yet.
I would love to hear if someone has similar experience or if someone can guide for a better solution. Thanks

Delphi Application and EV certificate, how to install/configure on Delphi XE6

Good morning everyone,
we develop a Delphi application for businesses and recently we are facing a lot of problems with the heterogeneous configurations of our customers, in particular with antiviruses and browsers.
Our app is developed for windows, is linked to our support portal (http calls), sync some other infos for some "global environment status" (linked directly to a cloud DB) and use FTP calls to sync requests or docs "to"/"from" the customer.
We've come to the conclusion that to avoid all of these problems we need to "code signign" our app with an EV certificate. Actually I can't find an "How-to" guide that explain to me:
How to install/configure the cerificate (in delphi XE6)
If there's some extra steps needed to build/recompile our app before publishing to customers
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Most cost effective way to deploy iOS app with Xamarin with only a Mac?

I have a strong background in .Net and some Python. After years of PC work, my primary (only) machine at home is a Mac.
I have an idea for an iOS (and Android) app that would be a total labor-of-love, there is basically no monetization possible with it, but I still want to do it. What is the most cost effective way to deploy an app, with Xamarin and only using a Mac?
I will need a database to power the app. I know that I can use MS Azure for a pretty low cost but I know that Xamarin licensing for the SQL Data library is a total budget killer. I know that I could expose web services, but that would require writing the web services with .NET and I want to do this project exclusively on a Mac.
So what are the database options? Can I hook Xamarin directly to MySQL? Can someone please provide sample code for connecting from Xamarin to MySQL? What are some of the better MySQL only providers? I wouldn't need a web host, just DB.
Are there any other potential costs/licenses that I'm overlooking?
You never want to expose your database directly to a mobile client. You always want to have some sort of service brokering your db requests to the outside world.
If your client is simple enough that it will fit under the app size limit, you can use Xamarin's free tier. Otherwise you can use the Indie tier. You should not need the business tier. If this is something that might be a workable open source project, I believe you might be able to ask Xamarin to donate a license.
You will also need an Apple developer license, $99/year, for deployment.
You can use MSSQL, Azure, MySQL, etc to power the server side db. You can write webservices with ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby, etc - there is no reason the server side has to be .NET unless that is what works best for you. You can run a VM on the Mac and run VS2013 Express for ASP.NET, or do it directly from the Mac with Xamarin Studio (not sure exactly what level of support there is for this under Mono, but it is doable). Most of the other options can be written natively in OS X.
Other than the Mac hardware, the only other absolute expense is $99 for the Apple Developer account.
For web services on a Mac with C#, look into v3 branch of ServiceStack. There is also ServiceStack.OrmLite which is a database client (MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server etc), it has a SQLite implementation which will run on the local machine (mobile) with Xamarin.iOS & Xamarin.Android.

ASP.Net MVC on Linux/Mono

I am thinking of developing a website using the ASP.Net MVC framework on Linux. I would like to know:
what are the best practises for developing such a site (are they any different for mono/ Windows)?
any gotchas I should be aware of
any (material diffeences) - e.g. missing/proprietary libraries/componenst between Mono and .Net
are there any special directives, modules required to run Mono with Apache?
Are there any performance differences between a site hosted on Windows/IIS and Linux/Apache?
I intend to do most of my development using VS Studio - can the site be developed using VS and then deployed on Linux?
I am aware that this question has been asked several times here on SO. However, most of the questions date back to 2008 or 2009 - which is a very long time in internet time. Things may have moved on since those answers - so those answers may no longer be relevant.
I have to state that I am NOT interested in hosting the site on a Windows server - so I am only interested in what works for a Linux server deployment.
I'am currently working on a MVC 4 app and we are using Mono. If you are just planning to have a basic website, you should go for it. But for more complex flows, honestly, I think you should do a little bit of research first, to see if the features you want to implement are supported in Mono. Things you should consider:
only a set of restricted libraries are supported on mono ( for example, right now we are having some issues due to the fact that the mono libraries (Novell and DirectorySearcher) for LDAP do not support pagination)
the developing environment will be different than your server env ( I am using Visual Studio, we managed to pass this limitation by adding a lot of logs)
we do our publish using FTP, so yes, you can deploy it from VS, using a publish profile set up for FTP
it's free, but it will take a lot of time to research & do special thinks just for the sake of Mono
not a lot of documentation available, because not a lot of people use it, so if you have a specific problem, it will be more difficult to solve
My experience is from 2011, but I am pretty sure you will have to experiment to see works and what doesn't - that's my experience with Mono.
Most of your questions are extremely broad and I think your question will be soon closed.
As for your last question this was the way I did it and it worked (develop in VS->deploy to Linux), but you must be aware that:
just because your code will work in the VS debugger it doesn't mean it will work when deployed;
there is no one-to-one mapping between Mono and .Net. Even when things work it doesn't mean they will work the same way. For example the implementation of the encryption code used for http cookies was very different between mono and .net.

Offline database access under Silverlight-3

As the Silverlight team worked through the betas, one glaring pain point that is existing in the realm of Silverlight 3 is the ability to have an offline database, so that you can right-click on the SL application, install it locally, and then be able to manipulate data in a local setting, without the Internet.
I've read a few articles where items such as Google Gears with SQLite had been used, but so far, no one has come up with a decent method by which someone can do the same thing with a SQL CE database.
I'm theorizing, and wanted to gain feedback... So many times, with LOB applications, you have the need for installing a "driver" into your system, which winds up being some sort of data access component or other monitoring device used by the LOB application. What I'm thinking about is to use a ClickOnce strategy and build a driver that would get installed on the local machine, and then make a "local" webservice for when the user is offline.
Has anyone tried this scenario, and if so, what were the pros/cons of the method? If you didn't finalize on this method, then what was your final decision based on experience, and what would you advise going forward for someone trying to crack this nut for their project?
Here's the best I could find for a SQLite-ish experience:
http://silverdb.codeplex.com/
I've been trying for supporting the direct database access in Silverlight since five or six months back. After exploring quite a few different to port the database to Silverlight, we got one POC working with one object database but it's a bit far for us to release it... I may probably write about this in my blog soon.
I dont think that making a "local" webservice is a good idea since the clients may not have any web service installed on their machine.
Thanks to Jeremy Likeness, there seems to be a great open-source project that he developed which may indeed solve most of my problems... just need to figure out how to render reports without a callback to the server, and then I'm golden, when it's time to revive this project (if all goes well, that'll be sometime in 2012)

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