Bhanu Birani - Application Development with Parse using iOS SDK

Bhanu Birani has four years of experience in the software industry and a lifetime association with the technical industry. After years of gaining programming experience in different programming languages, he started developing applications for iOS devices. He started software development during his graduation and was especially interested in learning about the new technologies in the market. He then joined a software company and started developing games, focusing on artificial intelligence development specifically.

I would like to dedicate this book to my family, who gave me the courage and confidence to write it and supported me throughout the entire process. I would also like to send a special thanks to my Mom (Neelu Birani) and Dad (Prakash Birani) for their relentless efforts to assist me in every way imaginable, as well as for helping me keep my life together. Finally, I would like to thank all my friends for sharing my happiness when starting this project, and providing encouragement when it seemed too difficult to complete.

Pierce Boggan is a student at Auburn University studying software engineering, with a focus in mobile. Pierce has a passion for software, entrepreneurship, and politics. In the past, he has worked as an intern for Xamarin, a company that allows you to write native cross-platform mobile apps in C#. Pierce now hosts the Xamarin Podcast with Chris Hardy, a bi-monthly discussion of all things Xamarin. In his spare time, you can find him writing about various topics on his blog at pierceboggan.com.

I would like to thank my Savior, Jesus Christ, as well as my friends, my family, and my girlfriend for their support during the entire process.

Raphael F. P. de Oliveira is a passionate software craftsman and an agile and clean code enthusiast. In his spare time he enjoys teaching and, most importantly, loves his life. He teaches iOS development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has worked on mobile development since 2009 and has published more than 20 apps.

I would like to thank all the great developers that inspire me every day: Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, Jon Reid, Matt Thompson, among others, and finally my wife, who is always by my side supporting me.

Johmel Rey Pintor is a Computer Engineering graduate from the University of San Carlos in Cebu, Philippines. He learned Objective-C by himself when iOS 4.0 was released. It was a steep learning curve because the aforementioned school did not offer this course. In addition, there was no one to approach when problems occurred, except the Internet. He was also busy with his studies as well as being a working scholar of his school.

It took him about a year and a half of studying Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to finally gain confidence to create applications. Although he has already created working applications, it did not stop him from learning the proper ways of writing readable, simple, and optimized codes by watching the first release of WWDC up to the present.

As Johmel Rey explored different approaches to what his applications could do, he then discovered how to create iOS applications that connect to the Internet, and then sync the data to the device. He first created his backend using PHP that connects to a MySQL database. It was a mess when the foreign key was introduced. Although Johmel Rey prefers to use Parse as a backend service to his applications, and the project worked without a glitch, he couldn't afford to be dependent on Parse.

As NoSQL database gained fame, Johmel Rey thought it was time to learn it. He then learned JavaScript by himself as a prerequisite to node.js, which works perfectly with MongoDBa NoSQL database behind Parse.

You can follow him on Twitter. His Twitter handle is @J4hmtor (https://twitter.com/J4hmTor), and on GitHub, https://github.com/technowar. You can also check his blog at http://technowar.github.io.

First of all, I would like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this perfect opportunity to share my knowledge on how to use Parse. Secondly, I thank my parents who have been supporting me as I struggled on which career path to pursue. I would also like to thank my girlfriend (as of the moment I am writing this), Roselle Angelie, for being so understanding and loving, and my pet Oddey who has stood by me. Ultimately huge thanks to the big man above.