where to start developing iphone / mobile applications in php?

Question

Hello,

I'd like to develop an iphone application using my knowledge of PHP. I know of some frame works like appcelerator that maybe able to help (have problems installing appcelerator though). My question is, what framework do you recommend?

Also, I've noticed some apps appear to simply open a safari browser and run, what "type" of application is that? Do those apps have the ability to use native phone operations such as take pictures, geo-locations etc?

Thank you

Answer 1

I recommend you open iTunes and view (and do the exercises of) the iPhone application development course from Stanford University on iTunes University.

Your PHP experience is not going to be that much help, but Objective C is a nice language and Cocoa a great framework.

You can of course run a web application on the iPhone, but unless the server runs locally (e.g. using Seaside on Smalltalk) you are going to have severe performance issues as the roundtrip time to the server is rather high on 3G.

Answer 2

I have seen reference to using Ajax as an 'sdk' for iPhone. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/260302/ajax-on-the-iphone (read the response for a link to dev works)

Answer 3

You can develop web services for the iPhone/iOS in PHP, either for a online web app that runs under Safari, or for inside an online application's UIWebView (see PhoneGap for an example).

But for developing a general purpose application that will run standalone and offline on an iPhone, you will most likely need to learn another programming language, such as Objective C or Javascript. And Objective C has the most complete API for using the iPhone's built-in features, such the video camera, gyros, etc.

Answer 4

For developing iphone application in PHP, I think, you should try a book on Amazon that teaches how to develop Web Applications for Smartphones using PHP, MySQL and jQTouch. The book name is "Beginning Web Development for Smartphones: Developing Web Applications with PHP, MSQL, and jQTouch". The book is worth investment. Very easy to follow and is very cheap too

Here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042X9CHI