Consuming Web Services on the iPhone

A 90-minute on-demand video course from the O’Reilly iPhone development series, covering how to integrate remote web services into native iPhone apps. Walks through HTTP requests with NSURLConnection, parsing JSON and XML responses, handling asynchronous network operations without blocking the UI, error handling, and caching strategies for unreliable mobile networks.

Recorded in late 2010, when REST was eclipsing SOAP, JSON was eclipsing XML, and the iPhone was making network-aware mobile apps the default expectation. Many of the specific frameworks have since been superseded (NSURLConnection by NSURLSession, manual JSON parsing by Codable), but the underlying patterns — async-first, fail-gracefully, cache-aggressively — still describe what a well-built mobile networking layer looks like today.

Part of a four-course iPhone development series released October–November 2010 alongside Optimizing Tables, Supporting Multitasking, and Injecting iAds.