Chapter 20. The web: web views and internet protocols

 

This chapter covers

  • Using web views
  • Parsing XML
  • Accessing other protocols

We started this book with a look at the web. Chapters 3 through 8 offered an extensive discussion of building iPhone web apps using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the dynamic programming language of your choice. As we said at the time, web development is one of two major ways that you can program for the iPhone, the other being the SDK that we’ve spent the last ten chapters on.

We’ve generally suggested web apps as the proper platform for creating internet-related programs. This chapter will present some solutions for when that’s not the case. Even if you’re depending heavily on the web, there are numerous reasons that you might want to program using the SDK. You might want to make use of its more extensive graphic capabilities. You could be designing something of sufficient complexity that you want to use a well-organized object-oriented environment. You might want to monetize your app without having to depend on ads. For whatever reason, you’ve decided to design an SDK web app, not an HTML-based web app, and now you need to know how to do so.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the major ways to access the internet from the SDK. You can do so in a variety of ways, and we’ll outline their hierarchy in our first section.

20.1. The hierarchy of the internet

20.2. Low-level networking

20.3. Working with URLs

20.4. Using UIWebView

20.5. Parsing XML

20.6. POSTing to the web

20.7. Accessing the social web

20.8. Summary

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