Question

I’ve done my node.js middleware in JSON for a realtime application on iPhone. I wanted to know if there’s any way to prepare a client for iPhone ?

Answer 1

At i.TV we use node.js to power the API for our iPhone app. We use NSURLConnection to make the requests to the server. It’s really simple. We use GET POST PUT and occasionally some other requests, express handles them really nicely. With express it’s easy to send down status codes with your response so that you can confirm things went alright. NSURLConnection makes it super easy to read those status codes. For example on the server you might do something like this:

// let's get some users
app.get("/users", function(req, res) {
   // made up get users function
    User.getUsers(function(err, users) {
        if (err) return res.send("Users not found", 404)
        res.send({users:["sally","jane","mark"]})
    }
 })

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer for a good list of appropriate status codes and other information about REST.

The ExpressJS docs are pretty nice too: http://expressjs.com/guide.html