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Ruby

Posted by Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

Going from ruby on rails web application to native iphone app

I was wondering how people do this, or if they even do it? Say I have a site like facebook, and then want to also have an iphone app based on the website which was built using rails. How do you go about going from the rails web app to the iphone app and accessing the rails databases and such without having access to rails.

1 Answer

Andrew Chalkley
STAFF
Andrew Chalkley
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Andrew Chalkley
Andrew Chalkley
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hi Stone,

Rails allows you to serve up different formats of the same data. For example:

/articles
/articles.json
/articles/1
/articles/1.json

You would use something like the respond_to method in your controllers and instead of serving up HTML you'd serve up JSON for the iPhone to read and display the data in the views on the phone.

You should check out some of the documentation on serving up different data formats.

http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/MimeResponds/InstanceMethods/respond_to

Regards
Andrew