IPhone application using an online database

Question

The manipulation and functionality of the database is almost completely new to me. I am involved in learning SQL (Lite too) for use in the data warehouse of iPhone applications, and all this is very confusing at the moment, but with due diligence I will persist.

My question is this:

I would like to make an application that has profiles for users to enter the configuration of certain attributes. Say, for example, Jeremy from Alaska loves to fish, I would make Jeremy an “Personality” object and fill out his profile accordingly. When he leaves the application, his data becomes cached to disk, and all this is easy to do, but what about the fact that Jeremy from Alaska expects this application to use his information on an online server, where he can access information from. .. web browser? Basically, my question boils down to HOW do online databases work in the world? Is Jeremy's application uploading his information to the SQL server somewhere? (Are there any better ways?). What exactly happens when he enters his username and password into the application? Does this describe a sort request to the database, including username and password information? And what software processes and processes this request?

How in the most basic concept can I set up the online database User / Profile / Logon / DataStorage? I am not asking to introduce gimmigimmi-makeitsimple, just a pointer in the right direction, and perhaps clarify some of the misunderstandings and confusion that I have about online databases.

Thanks to everyone and everyone for any contribution you can give!

Answer 1

My current iPhone app does exactly what you are describing. It consists of a library on the iPhone called Objective Resource http://iphoneonrails.com/ , which hides the NSObject representation of, for example, the User object in JSON and transmits via net over Ruby On Rails http://rubyonrails.org/ via HTTP which then runs queries against the MySQL database, which is basically similar to the free version of SQL Server. This is what you would call the three-tier system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitier_architecture : the iPhone client, the Ruby On Rails data access layer, and the MySQL database, which is the database level. This is pretty standard.

So what happens when a user enters a username and password on my system is that the iPhone application changes the username and password to a User object. The Objective Resource library then translates the data contained in the User object into JSON, and then sends it to my Ruby On Rails site. A method on one of the controllers in the Ruby On Rails stack captures data, and then runs the Update at the Users table in the MySQL database.

You can run various levels of data access, such as PHP and ASP.NET, and databases such as Postgres, SQL Server, and Oracle. But Ruby On Rails is free, and MySQL is there too, while others are not.

Answer 2

If you do not want to develop your own database backend for your mobile application, a web application, you can use an online database that supports the HTTP API, for example Ragic .

The doc API is here: http://www.ragic.com/intl/en/support-article/doc/1003/ragic-http-api