Professional iOS Database Application Programming, 2nd Edition

INTRODUCTION

WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IPHONE, Apple revolutionized the mobile computing market. The iPhone transformed the mobile phone from a device that you could use to make calls, check e-mail, and look up movie times into a computer that could run almost any type of application. Since the iPhone’s release in 2007, developers have written over 700,000 applications that run on iOS devices. These apps encompass many categories, including games, utilities, social networking, reference, navigation, and business, among many others.

The trend in the field of computing is moving toward mobility and mobile platforms, like the iPhone and iPad, and away from a desktop-based environment. Particularly in business and corporate environments, decision makers want convenient, 24-hour access to their data. The iPhone and iPad are ideal platforms for mobile computing because of their form factor and extensive set of libraries and APIs.

Although there are many terrific books about iOS software development on the market, I couldn’t find one geared specifically toward the enterprise developer that needs to mobilize corporate data or business applications. My original goal for this book was to present these developers with the information that they would need to be able to get enterprise data from a back office server, display and manipulate that data on a mobile device, and then get the appropriate information back into their corporate information system.

As I worked through writing the book, ...