Build an iPhone app with a Rails server - Rich Boldway & Andrew Duhan

This talk was presented at Austin on Rails at OtherInbox on Oct 26, 2010.

Until recently iPhone development was solely done in Objective-C, but now robust apps can be built for Apple's mobile safari browser. User experience can be propelled by integrating the iPhone's resources such as notification, location service and the contact manager with the PhoneGap Javascript-extension Objective-C framework.

Since Apple will only approve iTune apps that the look and feel can not be changed from download, the view Javascript/HTML/CSS has to be served client-side. This required us to overcome security restrictions with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). We will be showing how we implemented this on both the Rails server and the iPhone.

Subsequently, these iPhone views are Javascript-built client-side with JSON data from the Rails server. We used the popular Javascript/css library, jQtouch to built these div-based views. JQtouch manages navigation history that easily breaks. We will show how we overcame jQtouch and will discuss alternatives to jQtouch.

Richard started Rails in December 2005 and has developed Rails app in insurance, medical, tourism, language translation and isp industries. Being both a recovering Java programmer and home-sick Smalltalk programmer he specially likes writing less code and having more fun doing it.

Andrew is a software developer, audio engineer, and tinkerer who recently came to Rails from a traditional LAMP background. He loves clear and understandable user interfaces and the question "...but will it suck for the user?"

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• austinonrails
• rubyonrails
• iphone
• ios
• objectivec