iPhone development for Rails and Web 2.0 developers

Interestingly, many of the new iPhone developers seem to come from a Rails / Web 2.0 background. I am one of those guys who did Rails projects and now is sitting in front of XCode doing iPhone development.

I really like developing in Rails and appreciate it's simplicity and elegance. So here I am, I went through the process of morphing from Ruby on Rails to Objective-C/Cocoa.

Are there any techniques and skills I could transfer from Rails to iPhone development?

1. Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern
   MVC is the key pattern in COCOA. So, great there is one thing you would understand already when playing around with iPhone development.
2. Asynchronous UI on iPhone / AJAX on web 2.0
   AJAX-based web apps are great. If you have used AJAX and tried to understand the structure of how AJAX is used to make web 2.0 apps simple then you will be in a good position to make it "simple on the outside and complex on the inside". Cocoa on the iPhone can get information asynchronously from any web source. Check out NSURLRequest in asynchronous mode.
   
3. Database on iPhone
   There is SQLite support on the iPhone. Great if you are planning to build a self-contained app that needs to manage some data locally on the iPhone. I have found that I have less need for a database on the iPhone. The way we build our iPhone applications are mostly using the User Preferences locally on the iPhone to persist any UI state. The heavy lifting in terms of Data Storage is done on Rails-based applications and I integrate both through RESTful APIs. If you need SQLite in your iPhone app then you might want to look into Schema Migration support for the SQLite library FMDB
4. RESTful
   I like to keep the iPhone app lean and this is why I make good use of REST. The iPhone app is my REST client and our Rails applications offers the RESRful APIs. We integrate both through the RESTful APIs using a JSON framework for the iPhone. Actually, in some cases we use a simple POT (Plain Old Text) approach to transfer simple atomic text data from the Rails application and database to the iPhone front-end. This approach has proven as highly successful due to it's simplicity. (I hope I can find some time to post some receipes soon)
   
5. Metaprogramming on the iPhone?
   If you have used Metaprogramming in Ruby before you will have some benefits when you work with Objective-C/COCOA but I haven't seen as much use of it. Objective-C does support dynamic typing and you can send any object any message and decide during runtime what to do with it. You will come across a method called respondsToSelector that can check whether an object can respond to a particular method call. I am just starting to realise what can be done in Objective-C in terms of Metaprogramming. Not a much as in Ruby but better than C++.
6. Test-Driven-Development (TDD) or Behavior-Driven-Development (BDD):
   Sorry, not a lot of support on the iPhone for TDD or BDD. Unit testing and RSpec are not available. Considering how many Rails developers are also playing around with the iPhone SDK I am certain that there will be tools soon that will support TDD/BDD for the iPhone. So, how do you do proper testing? I will need to dedicate a separate blog entry to that topic. Stay tuned. (There are some tools that let you use Ruby to run test and migrations for iPhone code.)
7. Delegation Pattern:
   I found the Delegation Pattern the most powerful pattern for iPhone development. Delegates are used everywhere in the Cocoa framework. I started to use it heavily to realise notifications between different controllers via protocols. Take some time to get comfortable with it. It will make things so much easier when you develop a more complex iPhone app. Check the Apple Developer Documentation. Check out this nicely written article abut the different ways of listening, observing and notifying in Cocoa
   

I hope I can find some time to post some of the architecture decisions we made along the way as we developed some pretty complex iPhone apps with various integration points.