Ask HN: How would you do a database connection in an iphone app?
I am trying to develop an iphone application that needs to connect to a database. After about an hour of googleing I found that there a lot of ways to go about doing this(SQLite database locally on the iphone, MYSQL wrapper class to connect to a database, and many other). What is the best method or convention most developers use? Does the iphone SDK have any built in NS objects to connect to a database?
Comments
Local Data: Core Data hooked into a sqlite.db is the way to go. Some say it's a little heavy but I have had a lot of luck with it. It's going to give you everything you need to persist and query data locally on the device.
Remote Data: You pretty much have to go with a web service layer. The standard now-a-days is RESTful JSON. Directly connecting to a remote DB is too unreliable for the mobile world.
ASIHTTPRequest: A wrapper around network level API's for connecting to web servers. Use this.
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/
Depends on the app but generally speaking I would use CoreData to map the object and store it in SQLite database.
I can't think of any reason you would use a MySQL wrapper. If I wanted to get something from a MySQL database I would set up a REST api on my server.
We use a web service with JSON. On the iPhone, we use HTTPRiot to talk to the web service using JSON.