ios 7.0 ruby on rails database on remote server

Question

I am developing my first iOS (using 7.0) app. i want to send and retrieve data from a database on a remote server. The remote server is hosted by my web hosting company. they use LAMP stack. How can I use Ruby on Rails to add and retrieve data from the remote database? is there any book/website/tutorial that gives a clear solution?

Answer 1

API

Although I've yet to design this myself, I know that RoR apps tie into iOS through an API . If you wish to transfer data to/from your rails app, you'll be best making an authenticated API, like this:

#config/routes.rb
namespace :api do
   resources :controller
end

#app/controllers/api/your_controller.rb
module Api
   class YourController < ApplicationController
      respond_to :json

      def xxx
      end
   end
end

This is a very basic representation of what you'll have to do to create a JSON-powered "api" for a Rails app, which you'll be able to use to communicate with your database.

Some caveats to this include that you'll need to authenticate any request:

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There's a good technical overview here :