Lab A: Building Client/Server Applications for iOS

The top non-game apps (and many game apps) share a common feature: they connect to the network to share information; collect new content and in-app purchases; or to extend a web-based service (e.g. LinkedIn and Twitter) to mobile devices.

Building these kind of apps requires thinking about the whole system – servers, clients, app store, and notification mechanisms – and making smart trade-offs. This session will look at these issues by taking apart a pair of networked apps and examining their associated servers.

You'll learn:

When and how to leverage your current experience in building web applications into the mobile space

How to build the networking code on the client side, for both web-driven and wholly-native applications

When to use application servers and when to use alternate deployment stacks

Experience developing web applications using environments such as  PHP, JSP/JSF, Ruby on Rails, or Node is helpful but not required.  Web page and/or client-side development skills are required. Some iOS development skills will be helpful.

Participants must bring their own laptops outfitted with XCode and with the Java JDK installed.

A networked iOS device such as an iPhone or iPad will be useful for testing. We will supply course materials and labs electronically.