iOS App to interface with my web application - Easy?

[mlantz7]

Hey everyone...

I am a web developer, but know very little about the SDK. I need a really simple app that mimics another app I have on my website.

Here is the website.

To start off, I am looking for the app to be able to do just a few things:

1. Grab and display the list of codes from my web application (xml?)
2. Allow the user to "report" whether or not the code worked for them (just like the form on the site)
3. Have a "settings" screen where the user can enter some default information (login info, state they live in, default location)

I will ultimately want to add some more functionality, but that is all I need to get started.

So, my question, is this as simple as it looks to me?

I have been thinking about learning the SDK and putting this together, as it seems like a simple concept, but it sure would be a lot easier if someone who already knew what they were doing could throw it together for me. (I would pay, of course.)

What are your thoughts?

M

 

[Luke Redpath]

I can advise you on one thing: if you can avoid using XML as your data interchange format, you'll probably be better off; coming from the web development world (Ruby, mainly) where XML DOM parsers are the norm, not having one on the iPhone (and I understand why) can be frustrating. Whilst the SAX-style parser is light on memory, it's not light on the amount of code it takes to parse a simple chunk of XML.

I've been having more success using JSON. There is a nice little Objective-C/JSON library that you can use on the iPhone and it makes it really easy to get the data from your web application into an NSDictionary:

http://groups.google.com/group/json-framework/browse_thread/thread/9ad612ecffa22ba5

 

[mlantz7]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I am not stuck on using XML at all, I can build the code on the web-side to give the data however the phone likes it!

Ideally, the app would be able to cache the data as well, so syncing to the website would not be required everytime the app is run.

Also, my application is written in PHP. I am assuming I shouldn't have any trouble formatting the data properly using that?

Thanks.

M

PS: If you do know of anyone who is interested in putting this app together, please have them contact me via my website above.