Chapter 4. Integrating iOS Applications into Enterprise Services
In the early days of software development, you ran your programs directly on a computer, sitting in front of the console. Later, the idea of timesharing and remote sessions came into being, bringing with it the rise of the 3270 and VT-100 terminals, along with punch cards and paper tape. Later, network computing became the rage, with Sun famously proclaiming that the network was the computer. We got RPC, CORBA, and we’ve evolved today into SOAP, REST, and AJAX. But no matter what it’s called, or what format the data moves in, all these technologies attempt to solve the same problem, the same one that has existed since client-server architectures first came upon the earth.
As an iOS developer, you face the same problem today. You need to be able to reliably and (hopefully) easily integrate user-facing UI with all the messy business logic, persistence, security, and magic unicorn blood that does all the hard work on the backend.[1]
The Rules of the Road
There are basically two possible scenarios when integrating iOS applications into Enterprise services. Either you are starting from scratch on both ends, or you have some legacy service with which you need to ingratiate your new application. The former situation is vastly preferable, because you can fine-tune your protocols and payloads to the demands of mobile clients, but the later scenario is probably the more likely one. In any event, I’ll talk in general about each ...