Question

I am working on an app for a business that is essentially a catalog. The client has a website that uses a MySQL database, but he doesn’t want that to be used by the app. His website offers RSS feeds, but I don’t think that this would be a good idea. The app is supposed to be searchable based on a number of (optional) factors and show details of each item when selected.

Somehow, I don’t think that RSS is the way to go, but how to convince him? Is there an alternative way that will work? The catalog is often updates and that means downloading updates will be necessary. Should I try to convince him to allow for read-only access?

Assuming that I’m using RSS, what would be the best update schedule? How would searching work? I’m confused…

Please note:

[Thinking aloud here…]

{I am new to iPhone development, this being my first app. I’ve done websites for 6+ years and I know HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, MySQL and Visual Basic 2008. I have dabbled in desktop languages (C, C++, Java) and I am now learning Objective C as I work.}

EDIT:

I’m not familiar with JSON. Tutorial links?

Answer 1

RSS is not the answer you’re looking for. RSS is not really suited for arbitrary structured data, it’s built around syndicating web content.

You definitely don’t want to expose direct database access for a few reasons (security, response time, etc.). I would build a web service on the server side that provides a few methods (making some assumptions based on what I know about most catalogs):

• “get category hierarchy” – would query the database for the category structure and provide that back to the app
• “get items in category” – returns the item data for a particular category
• “search” – would accept a set of parameters, search the database using those, and return the matching set of items

I would use JSON as my data interchange format, as it’s a lot simpler than dealing with XML.