Question

I currently have a MySQL database that I wish to create a web service for.
One of the main purposes of this web service is to be used in an iPhone app. Because of this I would like to used CoreData, as it will make parsing on the iPhone side so much easier. How would I use CoreData to get the data from my MySQL database? Are there any good tutorials around?

Answer 1

To get the data from the server to the iPhone I would recommend JSON.

Then you need to write some code that will turn that JSON into an object that you can put into the CoreData database. You have a couple choices there, but I would recommend providing your own implementations of the NSCoding protocol. The great part about the NSCoding approach is that the object itself defines what it needs to save/restore one time, then you simply do additional implementations one time to support other formats (e.g. XML, JSON, simple serialization).

Here is the tutorial to sbjson, a JSON parser on Objective-C: sbjson project