iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Enter the Cloud

Apple, of course, created a great deal of excitement when it announced iCloud. However, iCloud is more than just an integral part of the built-in applications; it can also be used by developers to implement at least part of the application ecosystem I discuss in the previous section.

iCloud lets you create applications that share data between two devices. For example you could create a RoadTrip application that allowed the user to plan a trip on an iPad, and then access and even update that data on an iPhone.

But although iCloud does let you share data between the same applications running on different devices (which in itself is great), it doesn’t allow you to share business logic, nor, at this point, allow you to access that data from a web application, an Android device, or a Windows Mobile device. What’s more, it doesn’t allow multiple users to access shared data (something you would want in a social networking or calendar application, for example).

At this point, the easiest and best way to implement an application ecosystem is by using web services and an architecture that supports them. These services can be hosted on a third-party cloud-hosting solution, or they can be hosted on enterprise-based servers with an infrastructure bus that can access other services or data (as some of my clients are doing).

That, of course, needs to be in another book, and as it happens, I’m writing that one as this one goes to press.