Developing Enterprise iOS Applications

Preface

Hello, and welcome to the exciting, frustrating, confusing, complex—and ultimately rewarding—world of Enterprise iOS development. This book attempts to distill the lessons learned from more than a year of on-the-ground experience, moving an Enterprise iOS application from first concept to shipping product. Hopefully, I can help you avoid some of the hidden coral reefs that lie beneath the Sea of Apple, and help you find the fair winds to keep your sails full.

The relationship between businesses and Apple has always been a complex one, partially due to Microsoft’s traditional death-grip on the corporate market, and Apple’s sometimes ambivalent attitude toward corporate users. iOS has done a lot to change this, as it brought many new Apple users in through the mobile back door. The reality is that iOS is something to be taken seriously by corporate IT departments, and the old “Blackberry or Bust” mentality is all but dead. This presents a huge opportunity for developers versed in both the Apple and Fortune 500 philosophies.

Who This Book Is For

First things first: if you’ve never touched Objective-C or Cocoa before, you need to backfill some knowledge before you jump into Enterprise iOS. There are any number of good books out there to get you started with the basic Apple development tools such as Xcode. One good place to start is Learning iPhone Programming by Alasdair Allan, also published by O’Reilly. Apple also provides a number of good resources to members of their developer community.

I’m also going to make the assumption in this book that you, the reader, are familiar with the ins and outs of Enterprise software development, including concepts such as SOAP, XML, REST, source control, continuous integration and regression, unit testing and code coverage, etc.

So, in short, this book is aimed at someone who expects to be (or already is) developing iOS software for use in Enterprise environments, and needs to know how to make the Apple development and deployment universe work smoothly with the requirements of corporate software methodologies. But many of the techniques laid out in this book may prove useful to you, even if you aren’t in a large company or trying to sell applications to Enterprise customers.

How This Book Is Organized

To get you on your way, we’ll start with a basic overview of the challenges that face Enterprise developers working with iOS. We will then, in turn, address each one of this issues, starting with collaborative development problems, and finishing up with long term support issues for Enterprise apps.

Along the way, we’ll look at a number of the more important topics you may run into, including testing and distributing apps, integrating apps with backend systems, and a handy check-list of things you need to remember to think about as the ship date for your app approaches.

Each chapter stands more or less alone, so if you only want to see how to call a SOAP service from an iPhone app, you can jump right to that chapter without having to wade through all the other stuff.

Conventions Used in This Book

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Using Code Examples

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Acknowledgments

I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to spend the last year and more developing a challenging enterprise application for a major company, and I wish that I could publicly recognize them for giving it to me. Alas, because of the realities of corporate PR policies and liabilities, I cannot. So I will have to instead recognize some of the people who have helped me on the way.

Firstly, I need to thank Jeff Delaney, who took a chance letting an inexperienced iOS developer drive an entire platform to delivery. I will be eternally grateful to him for giving me the chance.

I would have gotten nowhere without the rest of the mobile team: Anand Kolukula, Anton Spaans, Ashish Patel, Dan Nottingham, Eric Kampf, Girish Bhardwaj, Peter Floss, Sushil Kulkarni, and Vijay Hanumolu. Much of the section of build automation is there thanks to things I learned from Jill Warnshuis. Carl Belanger and Robert Boisse took over an efficiently operating group on short notice, and had the wisdom to let Manny be Manny. Thanks also to Dan and Girish for agreeing to review the book internally, and to Bill Bartow and Susan Rossnick for saying yes when they could have just as easily said no.

Brian Jepson is a really cool geek and God among Makers, as well as a friend. I was lucky to have him both acquire this book, and run with it as my editor. He’s just one of the many people at O’Reilly I count as friends as well as colleagues, and that have made my many years doing projects with O’Reilly so enjoyable.

Both Daniel Steinberg and Alasdair Allan took time out of their busy schedules to take a look at a draft of the book and make suggestions (and make sure I didn’t come off as a total raving maniac...). My deep appreciation to both of them.

I have to give a shout out to Apple, for creating such a wonderful environment to develop on. I give you guys a hard time, I know, but it’s because I love your stuff and want it to be even better.

Finally, as always, my love and thanks to my wife Bonnie, and son Daniel. Without them, I wouldn’t have the reason to get up in the morning and try to figure out how to make the UIAutomation Framework run.