What's the best way to store data that one iOS app sends to another?

[Mark Wilcox]

>> Third attempt at my original first post to the list after writing far too much - I'll do shorter versions and split it in two.


And here's part 2 - to go back to the original (title) question for this thread.

To communicate / sync data between 2 iOS apps and store it on a server somewhere you probably don't want to write any server code at all.

There's this really great but fairly recent trend for Backend-as-a-Service providers - the reasoning being that most mobile apps need essentially the same stuff on the server side and building it so it can scale up massively if your app really takes off is quite hard. The most popular of these is called Parse (https://www.parse.com/) but there are lots:
http://build.developereconomics.com/sector/baas/

I wrote some articles on these tools and considerations when deciding to use them for VisionMobile which you'll find linked under "Related Stories" at the link above.

You can use Parse directly from LiveCode via their REST API or, if you want some automatic caching of the data and ready-made login screens etc, an iOS external that wraps their SDK might be better. Most niche apps would probably not get anywhere near the usage allowance on their free tier.

If you don't like the idea of having someone else running your server completely there are also open source projects that provide much the same thing on the server side that you can host cheaply yourself. Check out Deployd, or there's a new one from Heroku, not on the VisionMobile list yet called Helios - it's currently iOS only but they plan to support other platforms in future.

If enough people are interested in something like this maybe a Parse SDK wrapper could be my first LiveCode external project?

Longer term it'd be great if LiveCode's re-worked database layer (it's the last thing on the list from Kickstarter I believe) enabled you to plugin cloud services like this and maybe even cache the data locally.

Mark