iOS Cloud Development For Dummies

Chapter 7

Exploring an Existing Web Service

In This Chapter

Seeing how web services work

Having Google Geocoding do the heavy lifting for you

Creating a class to make web service requests

Although my ultimate goal in this book is to teach you how to build your own web service — a goal I tackle with a vengeance in Part IV — the best place to start is by having you use an existing web service. In doing that, you create a program infrastructure that will enable you to add any web service to RoadTrip — which in turn will make it easy to use the web service that you’ll create in Part IV. That web service will provide the user with the new and up-to-date points of interest instead of using the current list that came prepackaged with RoadTrip in the Destinations plist.

So, which existing web service should you go with? How about the Google Geocoding API that is part of Google Maps API Web Services? Yes, I know, RoadTrip already does geocoding quite well, thanks to the CLGeocoder that’s part of the iOS SDK, and after this bit of business is taken care, you will continue to use it. But I’m having you use the Google Geocoding API for this brief space of time for several reasons:

Because ...