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.
This is exactly what I was thinking. It seems crazy to roll this out instead of parse until there's a very clear reason why - and it's actually going to be more fun to use parse anyway since you get away from this kind of stuff.
On top of that, building this out is unlikely to match much of parse's capabilities unless a huge amount of work is put in (by you). And once it's 'done', it will no longer have that magical property of getting better without more work on your part, whereas Parse will continue to grow and kick (even more) ass.
There's almost certainly some part of this approach that would be fun, but I can't really think of it off the top of my head.
with apologies to patio11 for (mis)appropriating his meme.
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?
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.
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
In particular, I'd like to find out from you what kind of manipulation you have been needing to do. This would help us define the scope of this feature.
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?
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.
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.