When do you take the time to learn a new library? I decided now was as good a time as any since I was at a new job and working on a new application. In the past I have used straight JSON parsing and hand written HTTP code. This time I decide to see what RestKit had to offer for both areas and I am happy I did that.
It can be very hard to retrofit a new library into old code. The design most likely does not follow the new pattern. No one wants to start from scratch when an existing product is already working. Kind of a shame because a lot of the time doing that can really make things work a lot better and make it easier to catch odd exceptions.
Per usual I got the Android side up and running pretty quickly. I did use the GSON library, which I have used in the past, but I used it in a deeper way. I set up the objects with the correct annotations and I let the library create my objects from the HTML body of the response. Worked like a champ. I implemented loaders to pull in the data and images for everything to happen on a background thread.
Next up was the iOS version. I found a lot of RestKit information on the web so I figured I would give it a shot. Not only does it handle the HTML / JSON request / responses but it also deals with JSON to object mapping. It took a bit more work to get that going though. You have to return object mappings instead of doing simple annotations. Once I had it figured out it worked very well. Some trial and error as I made the request over and over to the server to see what else I screwed up in the mapping. The JSON objects I am parsing go 6 levels deep. I did not write the server side so I am not in control of that aspect.
The image side was a different story at least when it comes to requesting a lot of images via queue in a background thread. There is a lot of documentation about the older .10 version of RestKit but less for the newer .20 code base. I fumbled around with things for a bit then found the SDWebImage library which did exactly what I needed in very few lines of code.
I am using CocoaPods for all my iOS work along with AppCode for the IDE. Yes, I have to switch back to Xcode from time to time as I can't find ways of doing things such as adding a Font to the project. This is not a super straight forward thing in Xcode either. I really want AppCode to do everything. I have been doing my Storyboard work in AppCode. Took a little bit of time to figure out where to drag from to get the IBOutlet connections to work. Xcode is confusing in this area too, nothing leads you down the path, you need to know to hold down the right keys and drag things and drop them on the right area. They improved this with Xcode 5 where you drop directly in the code but boy does the screen get cluttered when you try and have an iPad Storyboard open with code too.
Working with iPad Storyboards is a pain in both products. The screens are big and even though I am running the IDE on a 24" monitor there still is not enough space. I guess I need to have the IDE span both of my monitors as anytime you need to set up a segue between two screens you just don't have the space to do it. Even running the simulator on a 24" monitor for an iPad Retina at 50% leaves scrollbars in place. This outright sucks. I use GenyMotion for my Android work and I am able to easily scale that window to fit on screen.
