Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks

Chapter 1Day 0: Setting Up the API

Unless the mobile apps you build are games, it’s highly likely that the requirements for any nontrivial app will include loading data from the web. To give you the best learning experience to evaluate the seven platforms, it’s important that you get a chance to make some HTTP requests. In fact, each of the apps we’ll build relies in some way on data loaded from the web. To accomplish this, the code download for this book includes a fully built API with a set of endpoints, or paths to call, such as /weather, that provide data to each of the apps we’ll build over the next seven weeks.

The API is built using Ruby on Rails.^[13] If you don’t have any experience with Rails, don’t worry. You won’t need to write ...