Question

We are in the development of an iOS(iPhone) application that consumes a web services. We are planning to host our web service (ReSTful web services) in the AWS. Initially we planned to use Restkit or ASIHttpRequest libraries for invoking the web services. Our web services contains GET, POST api and some image uploading for setting the profile photos of the users. Also we are sending video, audio files in to the database and accessing these files through web services. We are using JSON as our output format.

While searching through the web we found that AWS SDK for iOS is this. Can somebody advice us is it possible to do the above requirements (GET/POST/Upload Photo/etc) using AWS SDK for iOS? Or shall we continue with other third-party libraries like Restkit or ASIHttpRequest.

Please advise us.

Answer 1

You can use both ASIHttpRequest and Amazon SDK for IOS at the same time.You would want to use Amazon S3 service (by creating a bucket) for your media files.Amazon S3 is cheap,fast and easy to use. When you download AWS SDK you can see sample folder and an example of S3_Uploader for ios.

For example in my latest app user upload their photos to Amazon S3 and comment&vote to other user pictures etc… I use AWS SDK to upload pictures to the Amazon S3 service. While uploading photos with AWS SDK I keep URL,path, of the photos in a database and use ASIHttpRequest , POSTto update my MYSQL database, which is in another server. When I fetch data from my server I use JSON and AWS SDK.

So If I were you, I would use Amazon S3 for my files(photo,video etc…) and I would use either Amazon EC2 or another web service for rest of the database. I am assuming you keep your data in a database and interact thru GET and POST methods. If so keeping media files and database in separate places would be my choice