I am very new to IOS development.I wonder which language/framework everyone is using to create RESTFUL web services for high traffic, scalable IOS app backend.
The solution requires:
1. Secure Login
2. Restful web services (JSON)
3. High traffic
4. File upload/download
5. Quick search result from large volume database
I am from .NET and MSSQL background. I heard people are using PHP, Java, Python, RoR with IOS webservice development. I understand every language can have pros and cons, just want to know what is prefered in today's trend.
And for database, is NoSQL database a prefered choice than RDBMS for scalable large volume databse? I am checking MongoDB.
Apologies if I am asking wrong questions. I am investigating the technologies for this new project, and any input will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
I have worked in three major projects that all of them have desktop clients, web clients, and mobile clients (Android, iOS). The 3 have completed different server side approach, and all of them make me and the users happy:
Project 1:
Server: Delphi + RemObjects
Clients: Delphi desktop apps, PHP Web apps, Java applets, Android apps, iOS apps
Why Delphi? Because the existent project was already a Delphi multi-tier app, the development team have domain of Delphi platform, ans was easy with RemObjects (or even with the standard DataSnap) to return JSON, SOAP or XML-RPC to be invoked by the clients;
Project 2:
Server: PHP
Clients: ExtJS Web apps, Android apps, iOS apps
Why PHP? The development team was experienced with PHP, the projects was originally a PHP web app with some classes well defined and not coupled with the UI. Some new classes in the server that reused the existing code base, just converting to/from JSON were enough to allow the clients to talk to the server, with minimum effort.
Project 3 (initial development):
Server: C# ASP.NET
Clients: ASP.NET apps, Android apps, iOS apps
Why C#? Again: the development team was experienced with C# and ASP.NET, the projects was originally an ASP.NET app. We are refactoring some app logic into web services that will be consumed for both the ASP.NET app and the clients.
As you see, there is no need to make the team learn something completely new on the server side.
I'd suggest you to keep your development in .NET with MSSQL, taking advantage of your current skills.
If the application traffic grows you can move the server app to an IaaS server (like Amazon AWS EC2) that supports SQLServer, or even better to a PaaS server, which in this case Windows Azure will probably be your best friend.
These are all loaded questions that can't be answered without more information about what you're making, etc. I use a combination of Ruby with Sinatra and DataMapper (and SQLite/PostgreSQL) for most of my projects, but that's my personal preference and probably won't be of much help to you.
Rather than choosing a technology stack based on trends, why don't you just pick something with a good user base for help and go from there?
Related
This is my first time working with eCommerce Application - mobile app for iOS. Previously I have worked in developing many iOS applications - products and business based applications, banking domain, etc. Where, usually data is available at the client server and the communication happens through REST/SOAP services - parse the response - update the UI. I am familiar with this scenario.
I am just walking through the functional document for developing the eCommerce App, I found that they use CQ5 and Hybris as the backend systems.
I am wondering what is the role of CQ5 and Hybris here. In what ways it helps in managing an eCommerce application?
I guess they are for admin purpose. Being an iOS developer, how far I should know about them?
Hybris is the ecommerce system, and CQ5(now Adobe AEM) is the Content Management System (CMS) and Digital Asset management (DAM) portion. Hybris acts as the payment processor and inventory management. From a mobile experience perspective, images and templates for the UI of your app will likely coming from the AEM side (probably analytics too), while customer data is sent and received from hybris APIs. Hybris APIs are traditional REST/SOAP stuff.
If you need to learn something, you need to learn how AEM works and generates templates. Author -> Publisher -> Distributors.
I am wondering what is the role of CQ5 and Hybris here. In what ways it helps in managing a eCommerce application?
hybris is a framework to build ecommerce applications. CQ (AEM) is a CMS and DAM so it's not dedicated to ecommerce at all.
hybris also contains a CMS but CQ CMS is more advanced.
For me CQ is a good addition to hybris to manage pages that will be often contributed. The tool is more easy to use for someone that is not from the SI side. Also it offers more possibilities than hybris CMS.
Being an iOS developer, how far I should know about them?
It depends on what you're supposed to do.
I think CQ is not so hard to learn, at least for basic usage.
For hybris, without the intention of being mean, I would never hire an iOS developer. Indeed it's heavily based on Java EE technologies and Spring. So if you have no background in these techno you'll be quite useless...
Even Java developers I worked with experienced troubles when it comes to advanced development on the hybris platform.
If your role is only restricted to call WS exposed by hybris then you don't need to know anything about hybris. Ask the hybris development team to give you a documentation of the WS your supposed to call and that's it.
General question:
If I wanted to develop a web site, say ASP.NET MVC (the only web framework I am familiar with), is it generic enough so I can use it to have later apps for iOS, Android, obviously Windows Phone?
I mean I will need to connect somehow to SQL server that is the backend of the ASP.NET MVC web site etc. What are technical difficulties & considerations I need to take into account so that app is generic enough.
Note that I am planning it to be multilingual and will use ASP.NET resources to support that.
Or should I learn completely different framework to have it generic over multiple platforms?
Thanks in advance!
ASP.Net is generic enough. You can expose REST endpoints (although WebAPI is probably better to do that, but you can run that alongside, and consume from, MVC), create full user interfaces, etc.
However, if you are planning a write-once, run-anywhere application to avoid having to develop native device apps (e.g. Android and IOS), make sure to take the time to read this excellent (but long) article.
The MVC framework can definitely be used for mobile devices (when you say apps, I am assuming you mean websites that function as apps), and MVC 4 introduced significantly more support for mobile development, including things like templates (http://www.asp.net/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes#_Toc303253809).
MVC is a move to a less heavy handed framework than, for example, Webforms, and it should give you the flexibility to develop for any device. However, it does also open you up to coding yourself into some problems if you approach it in the wrong way, so make sure you are familiar with the framework before trying to develop some super next-gen responsive web app.
You can expose your ASP.NET MVC controllers to other platforms, like web services or Web API, so the client, IOS, Android or anything else can call your services.
brief history of my project:
2 versions of application, one running in windows form, another running in the web using asp.net
current task: to revamp the project to use asp.net mvc 4 to use only one version of code base.
In final product, there will no more windows form; but only the asp.net mvc. this is with regards with short development timeline.
concern:
my concern is for offline users.
maybe i can host the asp.net mvc4 offline using localhost and sql lite.
When offline users click on check update, there will be able to get the latest version of asp.net mvc 4 ?
any other better solution that is feasible ? i prefer the architecture fits the vb.net
Have you take a look at SPA. That kind of projects, by nature, can work in online and offline mode. One thing to take into account is the ammount of data that the offline mode should handle (most SPAs are using the local storage for offline use, which is a little small)
By looking at this site you will find a lot of resourses on SPA.
http://www.johnpapa.net/spa/
Deploying MVC app with Sqlite in localhost will be quite a challenge in term of maintenance. Maybe you can develop HTML + jQuery solution which can run locally on client system and make use of client cache to hold the temp data. Also it can interact with live app by making ajax calls.
I have a database on a database server. No web service in place to be consumed by a web application.
If I want my iOS app to communicate with a database server (send & receive data), I know I can create a web service and then call that service from my iOS app. But what web service is recommended for this? Should I just write a .asmx web service in .NET or should I go for MVC WEB API or may be go for WCF ?? I have spend hours doing research on this. Please help.
A lot will depend on where you expect the service to be hosted, and what technology stack(s) are supported by the host. If you are self-hosting, then do whatever works in the technologies you know and understand. If you want to use a host that targets its services to small-to-midsize independent development teams, many providers like Heroku support things like Rails services. PHP is always an option as well. Microsoft-based solutions and Java-based solutions tend to be more widely used in larger enterprises and data centers, and if that's where you'll host your service then these would also be good options. And of course I'm speaking in broad generalities here: For any general trends I might list here there are lots of exceptions where other approaches make sense.
If you'd rather let the decision be driven by what makes things easiest for your iOS code, I would recommend you start with server-side technologies that support REST-ful interfaces using JSON to represent your service's resources. REST-ful services are very easy to consume from iOS, and JSON-based representations of resources are very easy to parse and produce in Objective-C.
I am personally used this approach to set a direction for my app. For the service side, I am going with a Rails implementation of REST-ful web services. I'm a Java developer by profession, but for a small independent project the options for hosting Java services were more limiting than with Rails so I've picked up rails on the side to make my project work. So far it's suited my project quite well.
I'm developing a tool that will comprise a central website and a desktop application. I've only really done entirely online developent, or entirely offline/client-side development before and not really had to link the two. I could use some help in how to approach passing data to/from the online site & desktop app.
The desktop app needs to communicate & do some control of iTunes, so initially I'm building this in Cocoa on OSX & making use of the ScriptingBridge framework.
On the website side I'm thinking of using Ruby on Rails, with data stored in a mySQL database, as I'm fairly familiar & seems like a good match for the online job it has to do. (But open to other suggestions if there's a better approach!)
I'm struggling to find the best approach to easily transfer data between the Cocoa app & the online rails database - is there a simple way of having the Cocoa app access the online database directly, or is it typical to dump some XML onto the webserver and have the app read that?
Opening a RESTful API on your RoR system is as simple as you can get. Have your desktop app communicate with that API using JSON or XML.
Advantages to using JSON rather than XML: (1) extremely simple to manipulate in Rails (2) extremely simple to work with in Javascript, should the need arise to build a web client in addition to the desktop one.
It's a very bad idea to have the desktop app communicate directly with your remote database. Two main reasons:
Security. Such a setup just begs to be hacked. Some databases are "built for the web" (CouchDB comes to mind) and would be alright here, but MySQL isn't.
Flexibility. With desktop application in the field, making changes and distributing them to all clients is hard. Should the need arise to change your schema, the web application layer frequently allows you to keep the interface with the desktop clients stable.