Category Archives: Mobile

posted

April 26, 2009

Dealing with JSON on iPhone

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You can easily use the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data format in client-server communications when writing an iPhone app. This blog is not suggesting that JSON is a more superior format for data exchange than its counterparts such as XML. In fact, we have many projects that don’t use JSON. However, handling JSON is relatively straight forward in ObjectiveC.

Unfortunately, Apple iPhone SDK (as of this writing, the latest is iPhone 2.2.1) doesn’t come with a built-in JSON parser. But I found out a good one called json-framework. It is both a generator and a parser. As a generator, json-framework can create JSON data from an NSDictionary. As a parser, you can pass to json-framework an NSString that consists of JSON data and it will return a NSDictionary that encapsulates the parsed data.

posted

April 18, 2009

Broadcasting Information: How to use the iPhone Notification Center

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There are times when building an iPhone application that you
need to inform other parts of the program to do something, without regard to
what or where those parts are. The NSNotificationCenter (aka “notification
center”) is the way to go in these cases. Using notifications supports ‘loose
coupling’, which is a good thing in software design.

A notification center object provides a mechanism for
broadcasting information (“notifications”) within a task. An
NSNotificationCenter object is basically a notification dispatch table. For
those familiar with Windows programming, this pattern is similar to the Windows
Message Loop architecture.

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