How to Take Your Iphone App "online"

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By bikr
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iPhone

This article will cover the very basics of taking the "next step" in iphone development, and making an "online" app.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Step 1

The easiest way to get your app "online", and by online I mean able to store retrieve and share data with other users of your app, is to store everything in a central database and use a combo of PHP XML to do the actual communicating. Setup a database for your project, and polish up your php skills.
Step 2

You'll want all data that will be returned to your users to be in XML form, so that it can be parsed client side and used for your various needs. To do that you basically need to follow a format of ParentItem childitem1 blah childitem1 childitem2 blah2 childitem2 ParentItem

This gives our app something to look for and use.
Step 3

You can setup your php pages to accept variables in the url , and build your code so that at certain events it will retrieve the contents of a url that includes your variables. Example:
http://testurl.com/getusername.php?userid=25

a usage example would have the php page connect to your mysql database and issue a select statement that retrieves the username that matches userid 25..

SELECT username FROM users WHERE userid=25 for example..

then echo the data in your php as so:

USER USERNAME $username /USERNAME /USER
Step 4

Your xcode would grab the contents of the page and using the build in xmlparser you can have it set each element of the xml file (only 1 in our case) to an array with keys to be used as you wish..

That's it, look for more detailed instructions in the future, when the SDK's NDA is raised.

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