
Getting started with iOS development on Heroku - instakill
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-ios-development-sinatra-cedar
======
jmonegro
That's fine and dandy, and I love Heroku, but recently I've been falling in
love with Parse(.com) for iOS development.

True, Heroku gives me more control over how I want to handle requests, but
Parse has so much more built in and is simpler to integrate.

What I've been doing with iOS & parse is hook a heroku app to Parse's REST API
whenever I want to manipulate the data that is sent beyond what parse allows.

~~~
andwang
What feature can Parse build for you so that you don't need to hook up with
Heroku just to manipulate data? Perhaps a way for you to author data
manipulation macros in the data browser and the ability to run these macros
based on events?

~~~
jmonegro
That would be a good thing, yeah. Maybe let me write these macros with
javascript (which they could interpret on the server side) or any popular
scripting language that fits the bill.

~~~
andwang
Cool. I work there and I have been thinking about server side scripting for a
while now. Would love to talk to you more about it; shoot me at my first name
at Parse.com

-Andrew

------
marcusestes
Sinatra seems like a natural choice to write a simple web service API for an
iOS app. Anyone know where I find a deeper resource that might assist "Sinatra
for iOS" development?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Not a Sinatra app but you may want to have a look at this:

[https://github.com/lottadot/lottadot-restkit-ios-
rails3-1-ad...](https://github.com/lottadot/lottadot-restkit-ios-
rails3-1-advanced)

------
feralchimp
This "Getting Started" post is only likely to actually get you started if
you're already familiar with Ruby, Heroku deployment basics, and Sinatra's
dependencies.

There is nothing in this guide that lays out all of the components in the tool
chain and explains which problems each tool is designed to solve.

Okay, so I should go to the component level to glean that, right? Well on the
Sinatra site, there is nothing that explains the specific problems that
Sinatra itself is designed to solve. The very first line of the Getting
Started section of the Readme page says "Sinatra is a [some three letter
acronym]"...with no indication of what that is or why I should want one.

The problem with that is I gain no insight whatsoever into whether the simple
examples will translate to something I'd actually want to build. Without that,
it literally makes no difference how great the toolchain might be. Exploring
it is 100% opportunity cost vs. some shittier solution that actually explains
itself more fully up front.

------
ahhrrr
Grape (<https://github.com/intridea/grape>) is another great option for
building APIs in Ruby.

------
igorgue
Is it safe to have MacRuby as dependency on your iOS apps?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Just starting to read but my understanding is that CocoaPods relies on
MacRuby, not your XCode project.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
You are correct. CocoaPods uses MacRuby to read/write Xcode project files.

~~~
lukeredpath
And soon it won't even need MacRuby, just the Ruby that ships with OSX.

