What are my options for creating an iPhone app from an existing PHP website?

Question

I have an existing PHP/MySQL website that relies hugely on form POSTs for things like signing up, logging in, searching etc. I now need to create a native iPhone app for it. The business requires a native app for marketing reasons, I can't get away with a mobile optimized website.

I'm looking for suggestions from someone who has already done this - how did you rewire your website to POST/GET data from the iPhone app? I'm guessing I'll have to send/receive data as XML, which is then parsed by the server and client. Is there anything simpler or any framework that can make this easier?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It depends a lot on what you are presenting. You may be able to put a lot of your php heavy interfaces into web pages. The web pages and all related resources would be local to, and formatted for the iPhone. You can look at PhoneGap for examples of how to host local web pages and communicate with the host application.

I have been writing an eBook reader. About half of the user interface is done through local html files. In my case there is no network access, but WebKit is the easiest way to style text.

As long as your application does not look like a web page, it is fine if it is a web page. That may simplify big chunks of server interaction, especially things like login that only happen once or rarely.

Answer 2

If you don't have some sort of webservices or API to connect through for the website I would make that my first priority. While you can scrape HTML and send POST requests, it can get quite messy FAST. I've created iPhone apps which talk with webservices through SOAP requests, and have built an iPhone interface to a site, which wasn't pretty. It is very doable, but it is also very frustrating if anything changes on the webpage.

If you are looking for a decent library to help you get started with POSTing against forms check out the ASIHTTPRequest library at http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/. If you look at the site there is a 'How to Use It' page with 'Sending Data with POST or PUT Requests'. Otherwise you could just use NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection and handle everything yourself.

Answer 3

Jonathan,

I would recommend taking a look at the Apple provided SeismicXML sample app. It uses the NSXMLParser to parse XML in a asynchronous fashion which will be huge for your app. It also shows how to use a NSURLConnection to make the request off of the web. You can use the NSURLConnection (which is also asynchronous) for POST/GET requests.

As mentioned in another answer, the ASIHTTPRequest library from allseeing-i.com is an excellent library but all of the features you want can be done using the built in Apple APIs if needed for your business requirements.

Hope this helps!