Question

I need to download images from a website and display them on(?) multiple UIImageView.

Maybe I’ll code a php to “read” the directory and search for images, write a XML file and use it as medium. But I’m not sure if it’s the best way.

Answer 1

Let’s see the options you have to fetch images from a website:

1. Fetching HTML and Parsing the HTML to find the images (on the iphone). Then downloading the images.

2. Writing a script (maybe PHP) that writes all image links to an XML file (or JSON), and then fetch the output of your script with all the links.

If you choose option (1) you’ll need NSURLConnection to fetch data asynchronously (without blocking the UI). I would also use TFHpple to parse HTML using xpath queries, see this tutorial for help. Finally to fetch the images using their URLs you can use SDWebImage, SDWebimage also provides caching so your app will not download the same image multiple times.

The bad side of using option (1) is that any change in the Website you’re getting the images from will break your app and you’ll need to issue an update to the app store in order to fix it.

If you choose option (2), your app will be easier to fix if the website changes, you’ll just need to modify your script.

If you go with option (2) you’ll probably need NSURLConnection, NSXMLParser (or a third party XML parsing library) and to download the images I would recomend SDWebImage again. I would also advise using JSON (and NSJSONSerialization) instead of XML, just beacuse I find JSON easier to parse.