Business Intelligence Application for iPad - ios

I have some experience in iPhone development. Now one client wants to develop a BI (Business Intelligence) related iPad app for their organisation.
As I have no previous experience in development of such an application, I googled a bit & learned that these BI related apps show various data present in an organisation in various chart/graphical formats to the user.
Q1) So what is the best way to pull these data from server?
Q2) Also is there any API / Framework available to do this kind of app in iPad?
If anyone has any other suggestions, please post here.

There are a TON of ways to do this. You can build it with most any technology that your organization uses. The main key is to keep a clear separation of tiers. Build a web application that queries your database and have it present the information as XML or JSON. You can then parse the data and present it in your iOS application.
For actually doing data visualization, you will want to take a look at Core-Plot. I've used it on projects and it has worked well: http://code.google.com/p/core-plot/

If your customer wants an out-of-the-box solution for getting their BI on mobile devices, take a look at Actuate/BIRT. They have a simple way to get it into mobile.

Related

Database for Real Time Queries/Push Notifications

I am looking to build an iOS app and website that work 'together'.
What the plan is for each:
On the iOS side, it will be pushing information to the server in the form of a post. The users will then be able to vote up and down on the posts as well; which also implies they will be able to see the other users information (in real time).
The website will be viewing this information in real time and using the posts. If a post gets enough down votes the server should tell the website and apps to remove it.
I have experience with SQL. Although SQL does not seem to be the appropriate server choice - for what I want to do - given my experience with it. (I could definitely be wrong.)
I would like to host the information myself, however have heard that Parse is good about holding information for iOS apps. I just don't know whether it gives you enough freedom to work with websites as well.
TL;DR: What kind of database/datastore should I use for a real time queries that allows for push notifications?
All suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
Try Using FireBase
firebase.google.com
Documentation

Should I use web service or web scraping for my iPhone app?

I'm going to build an iPhone app and it's going to take some information from a website and I'm going to display it in a custom way. I have read in a few places that I should not use web scraping and use web services instead because it only needs to do it once and it will take off heavy lifting from server side.
What kind of information that I'm going to take from the website is names of soccer teams, date of the upcoming game and time. So do you have some pros and cons what I should go with?
Here is the website i would want to get the information from:
http://www.gp.se/sport/kommandematcher
How would I go to so I could parse that information? What would I start with?

What are the different ways to have communication between an iOS app and a database server?

I just starting to play around with iOS and web services. I'm writing a test app (My Books Collection) where a user should be able to register, login and then add books (Name, Author, Price, Edition, etc) and all the data should be stored in a database server. What options do I have to achieve this functionality?
I have programming experience but I'm very new to iOS and web services. Thank you!
Best practice is to have a web application mediator. We use php to handle queries from ios app and manages db. We use a light weight xml for ios - php communication and also add encryption sometimes. You can also add data compression to keep data usage low.

iOS app without API, alternatives?

Im thinking about learn to develop app for iOS. I had a lot of ideas, but most of them i would need the API of that website. For example: http://www.filmaffinity.com/en/main.html
The point is: is there any other possibility of collect/use information of a site without the API, anything else without the typical parsing or scraping?
Thanks you
To get the most up to date information to your users, you would need to use the API. If you want to store the data locally, you could do some initial scraping and build up your own database and distribute it within your app. This approach is not ideal because your data may become out of date quickly (unless you have a database update mechanism) and the owners of the sites you are scraping may not take too kindly on the matter

Reporting Service for Amazon RDS?

I'm curious if anyone has any leads for me on this:
I have a business app that we're building, that could benefit from some out of the box reporting services. Looking for reports that can be created and customized by the end user, without (too much) developer support. Think crystal reports / MS Access reports, but better and all web based interface.
Ideally, this would be a SAAS that I could buy, and that could hook directly up to my Amazon RDS instance. Then I would create frames around it within my business app for the end users.
I don't want to write my own reporting system - but I need it to be in the cloud to work with my system. Or be something I could install on a rails app.
So far, all I've found are brochure pages for services I've never heard of or developer solutions for rails on github. (meaning they have great report creation tools, but no front-ends for users.)
If anyone has any leads, or experience in this, I'd be happy to hear it.
Thanks
Docmosis.com
This is a cloud based reporting system developed for exactly this problem. It uses either Word or Open Office templates that can be edited and maintained by the end user with little or no developer support. There is a front end interface for the user to manage and upload their templates. Changes to the templates are reflected in report output instantly. Once deployed, your application simply calls the web service with the data to inject into the report (JSON, XML) which is then delivered back in a variety of formats including pdf, doc, html.
We have used this in the education sector for some time and found that it saves us a lot of time because the business owners can take on the task of developing the report formats in familiar MS Word and they prefer it that way.
I also know of a developer who has built an iPad app over it too. Docmosis streams pdfs back to the device and emails a copy to a specified email address. You can integrate it from most environments.

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