Rails as a Backend for an iOS Application

Ian MacKinnonVancouver Ruby Meetup Lightning Talks

Mar. 28, 2013

Thursday, 28 March, 13

We’ll be Talking About

• Authentication

• REST access

• Notifications

Thursday, 28 March, 13

Authentication

• https://github.com/applicake/doorkeeper

• has slightly outdated Railscast

• now supports Mongoid

• OAuth development environment can be a pain b/c of port number w/ simulator (RestKit ignores it)

• Most iOs libraries will keep a regular session

Thursday, 28 March, 13

RESTKit

• Your go-to for remote object loading and persisting (can even integrate with coredata!)

• Handles JSON/XML to object mapping

• Gotchas:

• Rails expects nested attributes for params

• Need root JSON element for mapping

• JSON payload size matters

Thursday, 28 March, 13

Configure RestKit to POST with a root path

Thursday, 28 March, 13

Thursday, 28 March, 13

Ease up on JSON Size

• Normal for application to be run on 3G

• Override a model’s as_json to determine the model attributes that will be sent across wire

Thursday, 28 March, 13

APNS (push notifications)

• Used to suck but there’s a pretty awesome gem now

• Grocer (https://github.com/grocer/grocer)

• “There are other gems out there to do this, but grocer plans to be the cleanest, most extensible, and friendliest.”

• Different Gateways for Dev and Production

• Token identifies a device, not a user

Thursday, 28 March, 13

Grocer

Thursday, 28 March, 13

MISC

• SSL Certificates are worth it

• Parse is an alternative way of getting up and running quick

• But you might need a web presence too

• Kind of hard to migrate when you have a bunch of apps pointing to api.parse.com

Thursday, 28 March, 13