could someone please explain to me the process of retrieving data from a remote database? I understand how to parse data from sqlite to an iPhone application however remote databases seem to be more complex. I tried to do research however i get confused about web services,clouds and other words that im not familiar with. So far i gathered that i need to use JSON to convert the data from the database into the appropriate format that is displayed on a php page? then the iPhone application connects to that page and retrieves the data?
Would someone be able to give me a brief explanation (also what database can be used with JSON? in this instance)? would me much appreciated (also if someone has any tutorials/articles about this would be grateful). Sorry if im totally wrong, trying to learn…
That are many ways to build a system where you have a client application that retrieves data from a “remote” system that runs a database. You have many many choices as to what the server runs, and what the client is… and there is a world of technologies involved in this…
Since you are interested in learning, I would suggest you to take into consideration a very common architecture for such systems and dig into it.
One such example is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and you can find a good tutorial at this site.
The tutorial covers everything you need, from setting up the systems, to retrieving the data and passing it back though the web; it’s step by step and pretty easy to follow. The only thing that is not covered is JSON, but JSON in the end is just a format to pass data back and forth, and you can easily learn the basics about it with this tutorial.
Finally, I would suggest looking at how building an iPhone app getting JSON data. This would be the point where you join the two previous tutorials.