Lightning talk given to Vancouver Ruby Meetup group on Mar 28, 2013

1. Rails as a Backend for an iOS
Application
Ian MacKinnon
Vancouver Ruby Meetup Lightning Talks
Mar. 28, 2013
Thursday, 28 March, 13

2. We’ll be Talking About
• Authentication
• REST access
• Notifications
Thursday, 28 March, 13

3. 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• has slightly outdated Railscast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

4. 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

5. Configure RestKit to POST
with a root path
Thursday, 28 March, 13

6. Thursday, 28 March, 13

7. 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

8. 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

9. Grocer
Thursday, 28 March, 13

10. 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