Chapter 15
Developing Mobile-Friendly Web Services
What's in this Chapter?
- Choosing the best technology stack for your web services
- Technology options for both Java and .NET stacks
- How to share data classes between client and server
- Best practices for developing RESTful web services
- The principles of optimizing your service for mobility
- An example of a mobile-friendly RESTful web service
The last few chapters have discussed the development of iPad applications using a number of different architectures and approaches.
In this chapter, you'll take a look at server-side web services development. As discussed previously in Chapter 8, SOAP-based services generally have a lot more overhead and are heavier than RESTful services, so this chapter will focus on the creation of mobile-friendly RESTful services. Dozens of languages and technology stacks can be used to create RESTful web services, but in the enterprise world two languages and technologies are the most popular: Java and .NET. You'll examine the basics of RESTful service creation using both of these technology stacks. Additionally, you'll touch on how data classes can be shared between the client and the server if C# .NET is used for both the client development and the service development.
You'll look at some of the best practices of mobile-friendly RESTful web service design, including the resource-oriented nature of REST, the importance of keeping everything as lightweight as possible, and RESTful service end-point naming ...
