Building iPhone Business Applications using Web Services
iPhone application development trends are slowly moving towards business use cases, according to a study by iPhoneAppQuotes.com. What once was a 50/50 split between business applications and consumer applications is now a 70/30 split in favor of business applications. Medical, education, business and book applications are the most requested categories of applications in the Apple App Store.
iPhone apps are just another extension of a business’s reach, from the branding, sales and marketing perspectives, as well as the ability to sell products and services. The iPhone is relentlessly dominating the smartphone market with more than 200,000 applications and growing fast, in its Apple App Store, along with some of the most robust features of any phone to date.
It is becoming clearer that individuals and businesses alike want to get in on the mobile applications gravy train, either to promote their business via branding or ctually turn a profit. We’ll start to see more and more apps with eCommerce, push notifications, social media integration and 3.0 functionality.
Need for Web Services
The moment we speak about business applications, it becomes imperative for us to be communicating with the outside world; especially the iPhone application will ave to interact with best-of-breed apps that provide useful functionality. This functionality is made available by so many web services.
However, using web services in iPhone is pretty tricky for Xcode does not have inbuilt tools that can use web services easily. Everything needs to be done manually where one has to send the XML messages to the web services and then parse the retuning XML result.
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