iPhone SDK & MySQL Remote Database

Question

I've tried looking around but honestly not finding much help. I am mostly seeking for advice as to how I should approach to develop what I am thinking.

I want to accomplish something like this.

Imagine a website, with a backend database. This database contains information fed by users themselves. The website is fully functional, now I want users to be able to have the same functionality on their iPhones. I don't use a local database because I want all users to be able to have access to the same database, and this changes constantly.

What would be the best approach to:

1. Allow users to access all the information currently available on the website (database perspective).
2. Able to edit & add new entries to the database

I don't know if me creating an array to hold all this data would be wise to do. Specially with large amounts of data. I dont know how well it can scale.

Should I create a duplicate SQL lite database on the phone itself duplicating that of that website? What do you guys feel would be a good approach to this?

Comments, links, references would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Sounds like the perfect time to create an API for your website. If the size of you application is not very big, you can use the same database, but would be good to run the API separated from the web server.

Essentially, such an API should allow you to make requests to certain URLs for retrieving, updating and deleting information from the database.

Depending on what server-side platform you are currently using, there are many options.

Client-side, your iPhone app can use http://restkit.org/ or http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/ if you feel confident.