Book Image

RestKit for iOS

By : Taras Kalapun
Book Image

RestKit for iOS

By: Taras Kalapun

Overview of this book

<p>RestKit is an iOS framework for streamlining communication with web services, and it relies on the AFNetworking library that is used by thousands of app developers. It has an interface that is elegant and well designed, and it provides a powerful object-mapping engine that integrates well with the CoreData database. RestKit for iOS will teach you everything from loading a simple list of objects to creating a fully-featured app.<br /><br />RestKit for iOS delivers constructive tools and insights into app development that will benefit any app developer. The book starts with a simple example and then moves on to more complex ones as your knowledge increases. By the end of the guide, you will be able to build a fully-featured app that uses RESTful web services and performs CRUD object manipulation.<br /><br />RestKit for iOS will provide you with all the information you need to boost the development process of both simple and complex apps. Once you have executed a simple example and reviewed the basic theory, you will move on to more advanced concepts with descriptions of real-life scenarios and how to overcome bottlenecks. RestKit for iOS is full of real-life examples that show you how to simplify data loading, basic and advanced object mapping, metadata mapping, and routing. This book also teaches you about routing, RESTful object manipulation and synchronization, integration with the user interface, and caching</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

MongoHQ – a MongoDB in clouds


"Three DBAs walk into a NoSQL bar. A little while later they walk out because they couldn't find a table."

For our examples in this book, we will use a service in a cloud called MongoHQ. It's the most powerful platform for MongoDB hosting. Apart from providing one of the best MongoDB hosting solutions, they recently released a beta REST API for accessing their services. This is quite interesting for using in mobile clients, as accessing directly a MongoDB server is not the easiest of tasks.

Note

MongoDB (from "humongous") is an open source document database and the leading NoSQL database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB

MongoDB's main difference from "classical" relational databases is that instead of storing data in tables, MongoDB stores structured data as JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster.

The nice part about it is if you are not sure beforehand on what your data will look like, the document-type databases are a weapon of choice. You can change the structure with ease almost on the fly; you don't need to run any migration scripts. This greatly simplifies development in the early stages and/or the startup phase.