Creating iOS Applications for Drupal

Track: 
Coder
Experience: 
Intermediate

Mobile Strategy is becoming critical to websites and companies who want to provide their users with more accessible and interactive information while on the go. iOS Apps provide a great way for these organizations to adapt their content and features to an integrated mobile experience.

With the rising popularity of these apps, we need a standard Drupal iOS application or Library to begin working with when developing apps that reference Drupal content. Today's solution is a Library that leverages the power of Cocoa/obj-c and connects it to Drupal.

In this presentation I will demonstrate how easy it is to integrate your Drupal powered website with Services, and the iOS SDK. I’ll go into depth about how to configure your Drupal Site in order to obtain the information you'll need for your iOS app. On the iOS SDK side, I will explain the pros and cons of the Library and any extensions you'll need to add for custom functionality. I've got a few demos as well.

The best part is, it all uses Apples Property List format, which means you can directly make objects from a Web Services call and not have to parse any XML or JSON. This greatly reduces the battery consumption and processing power required by your app.

Intended audience: 

Drupal developers wanting to create iPhone apps, and iPhone developers wanting to use Drupal as a backend

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
Whats happening with mobile why is it important?
Question 2: 
Whats the status of mobile and Drupal?
Question 3: 
How can I leverage Drupals power for my iPhone app?
Question 4: 
How can I use services to connect my iPhone app to Drupal?
Question 5: 
Why is the Drupal iOS SDK better than X alternative?
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Comments

Session overlap? Please review

Please review how your session overlaps (or not) against the other following session proposal: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/developing-apps-iphone-ipad-andro...

Unfortunately thats not true.

I do not believe this is a session overlap.
My talk is using native iOS functionality over using a cross compiled library called Appcelerator.

They are completely different as their talk will be based around Javascript, and mine is based on Pure objective-c.

Its faster than Titanium, you have more control over what you do, and you dont have to wait for a developer community to fix issues and APIS that are broken and unstable.

Indeed.

Best Drupal IOS SDK North of Antartica. :))

Wish I could come

Ah dearly wish I could come but am in Australia. Hope you put your slides up somewhere :)

A Llittle Harsh on TI aren't we

There must be a reason some of the best selling non-game apps are developed with Titanium. Not to mention that it's nice not having to develop multiple code bases for all the different, and ever expanding, device list. I do enjoy XCode and ObjC but I equally enjoy the agility of TI.

BTW... Bashing someone elses hard work is in no way any kind of selling point to your work.

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