
Build an iOS App on Heroku in 10 Minutes - matttthompson
http://mobile.heroku.com
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pooriaazimi
Looks very nice, but I have a feeling that it's like iOS Storyboards: Great
for simple demo apps, but _very_ painful when you have slightly more complex
needs.

For example I don't know how it can handle the following (kinda conventional
for a web app) situation: Multiple users, some are admins and some are regular
users, with some shared "data" (like, an item for sale) between the two.
Moderators can add/remove/edit items and edit/remove users, users can
browse/buy items, etc. - I think if you're building an app like this, you
really have to roll your own CRUDful server (with ruby or whatever)...

Oh, and BTW, RestKit[1] is probably much more mature and feature-rich than
AFIncrementalStore.

[1]: <http://restkit.org>

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MaxGabriel
This is OT, but just in case there's a good solution, what were your problems
with storyboards?

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bengl3rt
Sometimes the app is not a strict tree of view controllers, but rather a graph
containing some cycles. It is here that the whole metaphor of the navigation
controller and the visual tools that Xcode gives you to automate it kind of
break down and you end up writing lots of hairy custom code to manage your
transitions.

Sometimes things are presented modally here but get navigated to normally over
there - and once again you're mixing metaphors, implementing some navigation
in the storyboard and some of it in code.

I thought the same thing would be true with Auto Layout, but luckily that one
seems to have been a bit more "baked" when it shipped, insofar as I've not had
any trouble implementing complex views with it WITHOUT ever writing any code.

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iwaffles
This seems like a really easy way for iOS developers to build/prototype apps
with a cloud backend.

Is there any security to this or is it just good for prototyping? What's to
stop me from requesting user accounts with passwords?

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matttthompson
Probably not a great idea as-is, without some level of user authentication.
I'm definitely working on a nice, integrated solution for that.

In the meantime, you can mount Rack::CoreData (<https://github.com/mattt/rack-
core-data>), which powers the Buildpack, alongside other authentication
middleware to create a workable production application.

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conradev
Just as a general advisory, from AFIncrementalStore's README:

> This is still in early stages of development, so proceed with caution when
> using this in a production application. > Any bug reports, feature requests,
> or general feedback at this point would be greatly appreciated.

While it is a great library already, and built up from solid core frameworks,
it has its share of bugs and rough edges!

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conradev
[https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFIncrementalStore/commit/53...](https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFIncrementalStore/commit/530286d30e67758e6e276153f3356182419b6e2f)

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pierrebouchet
This looks like competition for Parse (and a few others I guess, but Parse was
the first one I heard of). However I have tried neither. Is there anyone who's
tried both? What are their pros/cons?

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cwilson
This isn't a purely technical pros/cons, but still a good way of looking at
them both:

\- They are both well backed (Heroku by Salesforce money/profits, Parse by
great investors), have awesome founders, talented employees, and are both YC
companies.

\- Parse is pretty much 100% mobile focused. This is their bread and butter.

\- Heroku is Polyglot and spans dozens of platforms on multiple OS's, with no
real focus.

I think this comes down to where you run the rest of your stack, how tightly
you want things integrated, and which service is the easiest to use and most
reliable. Is mobile 99% of what you do? Parse is probably the best choice. Is
mobile 25% of your business and you're already using Heroku for everything
else? I could go either way here. We use Heroku and AWS to drive 100% of our
platform, but we're also not mobile (yet). I personally know the Parse guys
and they are outstanding at what they do and growing at a phenomenal rate, so
when we do dive into mobile I'll likely be giving them a shot first.

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revicon
ymmv but we had a lot of problems with extreme slowness and downtime when
using parse, it made development a bear and we were only using it for some
testing. We wouldn't use it in production after our experience.

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objclxt
I think mileage definitely varies! I use Parse on a large app in production
(100,000+ active users) and haven't experienced any downtime or slowness.
Although perhaps my use-case is different to yours. You should try getting in
touch with the Parse guys, I've found them very helpful and responsive. Just
thought I'd offer the other side of the coin.

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magicarp
So with this, is Heroku going after Parse?

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holgersindbaek
This looks awesome.

What would you do if you wanted to create a web-app version of your mobile app
as well?

Would you hook it up to the api that is generated?

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matttthompson
Absolutely--you can use the same API without modification to write a web,
Android, or Mac client.

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holgersindbaek
That's cool.

Is there any examples out there on how to integrate it with a web-app as well?

What's the big advantage in relation to Parse? I love Heroku, but Parse seems
like a really smooth solution for iOS/Mac.

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rhizome
One possible advantage would be to touch the ecosystem outside of Apple.

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objclxt
Parse has first-party SDKs for Windows Phone, OS X, iOS, JS, and Android.
There are third-party interfaces for many languages (PHP, Ruby, etc). It's not
an Apple-only solution.

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mmanfrin
As someone who is just learning how to be _okay_ at testing in rails/ruby,
this both amazes and terrifies me.

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shaaaaawn
this is perfect timing. We just spent the weekend getting an app deployed on
heroku for desktop view. thanks!

lumawake.us

