iOS Cloud Development For Dummies

Chapter 11

The RoadTrip Web Services

In This Chapter

Designing a web service

Understanding the web service specifications

As things now stand in the RoadTrip app, the points of interest available to a user to add to his or her itinerary come bundled with the app in the Destinations.plist. This, of course, does tend to make updating the points of interest a bit cumbersome because to do so you would have to send out a new version of the app.

In this part, you get to change that.

First, you’ll have the app download the points of interest using a web service. In broad terms, this ends up being very similar to how you used the Google Geocoding API, as spelled out in Chapter 7. In this case, however, you actually use your own web services — ones that you create — instead of ones commonly available. What’s more, because you want to save network bandwidth and create the best possible user experience, you’ll create a web service that the RoadTrip app can use to determine whether it has the latest set of points of interest and then download only the latest set if an update is actually required.

You’ll also, as the developer, need to be able to add and delete points of interest from the web service’s database.

Over the next few chapters, you’ll be implementing these various web services ...