iPhone coding for web developers
Matt Biddulph www.hackdiary.com

From websites
to mobile apps

www.twitter.com

m.twitter.com

Twitterifc, Tweetie and Twitterfon

www.facebook.com

m.facebook.com

native iPhone app

Joe Hewitt on the native
Facebook app

“People must have assumed that
all I had to do was plug Facebook's data into Apple's ready-to-use UI components and hit the GO button. Joe Hewitt on the native Facebook app

“I wish it had been
that easy, but unfortunately many of the components I needed were missing from the iPhone SDK, even though they existed in Apple's own apps.” Joe Hewitt on the native Facebook app

Phonegap

Building native internet apps

Internet app basics

Internet app basics HTTP JSON
or XML Regular Expressions Local storage

HTTP NSURLRequest is fiddly. I
use GTMHTTPFetcher from Google Toolbox for Mac. http://code.google.com/p/google-toolbox-for-mac/ or TTURLRequest from Joe Hewitt http://joehewitt.com/post/the-three20-project/

XML Mac OS X has
NSXMLDocument for DOM parsing. The iPhone only has NSXML for SAX parsing. This is hard.

XML iPhone ships with libxml2.
It is good, fast and has a nasty C API. Convenience wrapper functions make it much easier: NSArray *PerformXMLXPathQuery(NSData *document, NSString *query); http://cocoawithlove.com/2008/10/using-libxml2-for-parsing-and-xpath.html

JSON Objective C coders make
liberal use of mix-ins. Ruby coders fondly call this ‘monkeypatching’. #import quot;NSString+SBJSON.hquot; [@quot;{quot;1quot;:2}quot; JSONValue]; (returns an NSDictionary)

Regular Expressions Some people, when
confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. —usually attributed to jwz in comp.lang.emacs

Regular Expressions Again, the iPhone’s
string handling has no regular expression builtins. But it ships with the ICU library that does.

Regular Expressions RegexKitLite extends NSString
with methods that bridge to ICU. This gives you UTF-safe functions with small memory overhead and caching. http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/

Regular Expressions As usual with
Objective C, the method names are rather verbose. split: componentsSeparatedByRegex gsub: stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex backrefs: matchEnumeratorWithRegex

Local Storage SQLite is the
iPhone’s default database management library. This is a good thing.

Local Storage Yet again, it’s
a C library that isn’t integrated with Cocoa.

Local Storage FMDB is an
Objective C wrapper modeled on Java’s JDBC. It’s sensible. FMDatabase* db = [FMDatabase databaseWithPath:@quot;...quot;]; [db open]; [db executeUpdate:@”SELECT ...”]; http://code.google.com/p/flycode/source/browse/trunk/fmdb

A few words about event-driven
code

The user is in control

UI responsiveness and rendering is
a priority

Fallacies of
networked
computing

Fallacies of networked computing The
network is reliable. Latency is zero. Bandwidth is infinite.

The world is asynchronous But
threads are hard

Understand
delegation

thank you Matt Biddulph www.hackdiary.com
Flickr photo heroes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/1215753803/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/envision/3085397880/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/frinky/3236718934/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickbilton/2861938380/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/donsolo/2855854548/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/en321/209425860/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mastrobiggo/2424561037/