Professional iPhone® and iPad™ Database Application Programming

Chapter 10. Working with XML on the iPhone

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating HTTP requests and receiving responses

• Understanding XML and how to use it in your applications

• Parsing XML to obtain the data that you need

• Using an external C library with your iPhone SDK applications

• Generating XML using the libxml library

In the first Part of the book, you learned how to get data out of an enterprise database and store it on the iPhone with SQLite. You also learned how to display data on the iPhone using the UITableView and customized UITableViewCell objects. In the second Part, you learned how to create and manage data on the iPhone using Core Data. In this section, you will learn how you can get your data off the device and into another system using XML and web services.

This chapter lays the groundwork for working with web services by showing you how to send data over the Web using the HTTP protocol and how to deal with the returned data in XML format.

You will learn how to communicate with external servers over the Web and how to deal with the response from a web server. I will cover the Cocoa classes that you will use in the following chapter for working with web services.

IPHONE SDK AND THE WEB

This section provides a quick refresh of the architecture of a Web-based application. Then you explore the classes in the iPhone SDK and the Cocoa framework that support network communication over the Web using the HTTP protocol. You finish this section by starting the chapter example, which will get ...