iOS 6 Programming Cookbook

Now that Apple has introduced the GameKit framework to its iOS SDK, you can integrate Game Center features directly into your iPhone and iPad apps. This concise cookbook shows you how it's done, with 18 targeted recipes for adding leaderboards, user authentication, achievements, multiplayer games, and many other features.

How do you display players' scores and achievements? How do you create Game Center accounts and add friends? Each recipe in this book includes a simple code solution you can put to work immediately, along with a detailed discussion that offers insight into why and how the recipe works.

Recipes include techniques to:

• Set up Game Center for an iOS App
• Use block objects and Grand Central Dispatch to write Game Center apps
• Authenticate a local player in Game Center
• Use iTunes Connect to create leaderboards and achievements
• Retrieve leaderboard and achievement information programmatically
• Handle players' state changes in multiplayer games

Ready to put your ActionScript 3 skills to work on iPhone and iPad apps? This hands-on book walks you through the process of creating an Adobe AIR application for iOS devices from start to finish, using the Flex 4.5 framework. Move quickly from a basic Hello World application to complex interactions with iOS APIs, and get complete code examples for working with device components—including the accelerometer, GPS, camera, gallery, and multitouch display. This is an ideal resource for Flex developers of all levels.

• Use Flash Builder 4.5 to create and debug a Flex Mobile project
• Choose a layout option to determine which files Flash Builder autogenerates
• Explore APIs that enable your app to interact with the camera, accelerometer, and GPS
• Read and write text files, and create and write to an SQLite database
• Interact with the browser, place calls, and create emails and text messages
• Load content into your app with StageWebView
• Design for iOS with specific UI elements while maintaining one code version for all mobile devices
• Publish your app to an Apple iOS installer file with Flash Builder

While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.

Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.

• Learn how to design resources to meet various application scenarios
• Successfully design representations and URIs
• Implement the hypertext constraint using links and link headers
• Understand when and how to use Atom and AtomPub
• Know what and what not to do to support caching
• Learn how to implement concurrency control
• Deal with advanced use cases involving copying, merging, transactions, batch processing, and partial updates
• Secure web services and support OAuth

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework

"RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist

You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages.

This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book:

• Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language
• Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services
• Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
• Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages
• Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)
• Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients

Get the hands-on experience you need to program for the iPhone and iPod Touch. With this easy-to-follow guide, you'll build several sample applications by learning how to use Xcode tools, the Objective-C programming language, and the core frameworks. Before you know it, you'll not only have the skills to develop your own apps, you'll know how to sail through the process of submitting apps to the iTunes App Store.

Whether you're a developer new to Mac programming or an experienced Mac developer ready to tackle the iPhone and iPod Touch, Learning iPhone Programming will give you a head start on building market-ready iPhone apps.

• Start using Xcode right away, and learn how to work with Interface Builder
• Take advantage of model-view-controller (MVC) architecture with Objective-C
• Build a data-entry interface, and learn how to parse and store the data you receive
• Solve typical problems while building a variety of challenging sample apps
• Understand the demands and details of App Store and ad hoc distribution
• Use iPhone's accelerometer, proximity sensor, GPS, digital compass, and camera
• Integrate your app with iPhone's preference pane, media playback, and more