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Ruby

Posted by ricky james
ricky james
38 Points

creating an iphone app with a ruby on rails backend

After studying ruby on rails l love and was thinking of creating an iphone app. But confused how to approach it as l want the web version of the app and the iphone app version to have the same database. l was thinking of building an API into the rails app and use that to pull information into my iphone app. is that right or any ideas?

Jason Seifer Jim Hoskins Ben Jakuben Amit Bijlani

1 Answer

Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points
Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points

Building a web API that powers both the Rails site and a native iOS app seems like the right approach to me. Presumably you'd use that API to serve up JSON or similarly formatted data to iOS, which would plug that into appropriate models. Is this data something that will update itself frequently, or only sometimes? How large is the data? You should consider those questions in your approach too, as you should consider whether you need to frequently poll the API for data changes, or whether to have some kind of local storage on the iOS device.

ricky james
ricky james
38 Points

Thanks for the comment Nathan Fulkerson the data would just of user models with a possibility of growing and updating. Local storage seemed like a choice but could not figure out how to keep that and my web app in sync.