All,
I’m writing an extensive iPad application with a Core Data based data model. Because the app requires a lot of user input / typing, I would also want to make the functionality available as a web page, so that users can use standard PCs to key in some of the data.
I’m not particularly worried about the UI for that web app, but I do want to re-use the application logic and Core Data model that I’m using for the iOS app, so my preferred approach would be to expose the functionality as web services on a Mac (using the built-in Apache web server, most likely), using XCode for MacOS.
(1) Are there any existing XCode-based frameworks that simplify the generation of web services?
(2) Am I missing something obvious i.e. is there a better approach to tackle the problem “exposing iOS functionality through a web environment”? Obviously, I could’ve immediately focused on writing the app in HTML5, but I did want to leverage all the goodies that come with iOS/Cocoa.
(3) Alternatively, I could write a native Mac OS app. That facilitates the re-use of Core Data, etc., but I heard it takes a lot of work to port iOS apps to Mac OS. The question then is what’s more work – exposing the functionality as web services or porting it to Mac OS… in both cases, I would need to rewrite the UI.
thanks everyone,
Fabian
I did some more research and came across the WebAppKit framework. It allows you to easily set up a web server capability and handle requests and responses. It’s lightweight, easy to understand – exactly what I wanted.