Get Your iPhone and Rails Apps Talkin'

I have recently had to scale out a Rails application into a real iPhone application.

Let me save you some time and headache. Stay as far away as you can from the majority of syntactic sugar and shortcuts. The Rails way does not scale.

With that being said, I love Rails and I will continue to use it for the rest of my projects. You just have to realize what parts will be bottlenecks for your (Active Record) and customize your own way to talk to the DB so that you can shard and implement memcached easily.

Now I have obviously not seen what these guys have to offer, I'm sure it is amazing. But you can already communicate with the iPhone with plain old Rails and it works amazingly well.

Neat stuff. I'm wrapping up writing a custom rails app that will talk to the iPhone, and because I don't have to support other platforms I've designed my XML to be optimized for parsing on the client side.

The simplest optimization is to have NOTHING in text between tags. If you want to associate values with a specific element, then add a set of attributes to the element instead. Much simpler to do a bunch of if/else statements inside parser:didStartElement than to keep track of text, last element name, and all sorts of potential depth issues.

Wow this is pretty awesome, our small team has been focused on the base app and utility but we're definitely now looking around for tools like to take our apps to the next level.

I think the next 6 months will be interesting for the AppStore as the junk apps are shaken out (economic pressure and through changes in the store's functionality), and developer tools begin to mature.