Professional iPhone® and iPad™ Database Application Programming

INTRODUCTION

WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IPHONE, Apple revolutionized the mobile computing market. The iPhone transformed the mobile phone from a device that you could use to make calls, check e-mail, and look up movie times into a computer that could run almost any type of application that you can think of. Since the iPhone's release in 2007, developers have written over 200,000 applications for the device. These "apps" encompass many categories including games, utilities, social networking, reference, navigation, and business among many others.

The trend in the field of computing is moving toward mobility and mobile platforms like the iPhone and away from a desktop-based environment. Particularly in business and corporate environments, decision makers want convenient access to their data at all times. The iPhone is an ideal platform for mobile computing because of its small form factor and extensive set of libraries and APIs, and its general popularity as a mobile phone.

While there are many terrific books on iPhone software development on the market, I couldn't find one geared toward the enterprise developer that needs to mobilize corporate data or business applications. My original goal for this book was to present these developers with the information that they would need to be able to get enterprise data from a back office server, display and manipulate that data on a mobile device, and then get the appropriate information back into their corporate information system.

As I worked ...