iPhone Application

[cotton31]

Hi,

I am looking at building an application for the iPhone which pulls data from a MS SQL server.

I have a few questions:

• Would this be best as a Web App hosted on the same server as the SQL Server, or a native app?
• What would be the best way for me to link in to the SQL database, depending on the answer to the above?
• The app will only be used by those working for the company, what security concerns should I have?
• Can anyone with experience of developing either a web or native app point me to some good resources?

If you need more information, please ask.

Thanks,

 

[mattgaunt]

The best advice I can give you is the following:

Always use a web app if you don't need to take advantage of any native specific features (i.e. you don't need the camera or access when offline etc)

Think about this and it should tell you whether you need a web app or a native app.

Note: Good thing with web app is that it should work with other devices Android, Blackberry, Nokia and on the iPhone you can create a link on the springboard just like an app (But I think you need to add some apple specific code to enable this)

In terms of accessing the MS SQL db, I would guess you would access it directly if it were a web app, but for a natvie app you would probably need to build some sort of api, then the iphone can run a httprequest and get JSON response.

In terms of security, if it's going to be used internally only, you can make it so you don't submit it to the app store and distribute some other way (I don't know how you do this, I only know that it can be done)

But either way web app or native, you will probably want a log in system so you can control who has access if security is a concern.

Web app - just a web page so look up any coding sources (http://jqtouch.com/ might be of interest)

Native app - you will need to sign up as a developer with apple, I believe they have some great resources there (Although I haven't looked into it too much)

 

[cotton31]

Thanks for your quick reply - I was leaning towards a Web App anyway as I have experience with web development.

Would ASP.NET using Visual Studio be the way to go in terms of using the MS SQL Server database?

I'll take a look at jqtouch.

Thanks,

 

[lokkers]

Webapp using .NET would be the way I would go. If it's purely for internal use (i.e. Intranet only), you could secure the site using Windows Auth in IIS (which is what I do at home), which makes things even easier.

 

[NickK]

I've done an application very like this in Objective-C on the iPhone. I think a webapp would be a better way to go considering you're not doing anything that really needs to be an coded- application.