Ruby on Rails website to iPhone app

Question

This is going to be a very generic question and I'm sorry. But lets say I have a website I wrote using Ruby on Rails and I now wish to turn it into a native iPhone app, downloadable from the app store. Can someone just point me in the direction of some useful tools/tutorials or anything helpful?

Thanks

Answer 1

checkout

http://railscasts.com/episodes/199-mobile-devices

Answer 2

You've got a long road ahead of you and a ton of choices to make. The bottom line is that you have to decide what the capabilities of the application must do and choose the tools & technologies that match that intent.

Most apps will benefit from being written in native Objective-C using Xcode. You can utilize tools like ASIHTTPRequest, RestKit, or ObjectiveResource in order to communicate with the server.

I don't recommend utilizing your Rails controllers as a mobile API for a number of reasons:

• it tightly couples your clients to your internal software model, this totally prevents you from evolving your model over time
• you might want different things accessible form your mobile clients (for security probably)
• the restful nature of these controllers are easy to work with in Rails views, but not so much from a raw HTTP perspective

If you're comfortable with web technologies you can also look at Titanium, Sencha, and PhoneGap.