Tags / apple

Had some free time during a long mandatory training session at work and started perusing Apple’s macOS Sketch file with all the components that go into making a desktop app. I love imagining how components come together to form something useful 🤓 The training session I was enduring had minimum time limits. For someone who reads fast and watches video at 2x I decided it would be fun to throw together a desktop version of Facebook between modules — the most BORING version possible with nothing fancy, just standard macOS components.

Twice while living in Kansas I attempted to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. Getting past the first few chapters was pretty mind numbing. It didn’t really have anything to do with the difficulty curve. I already knew other languages—Python, Javascript—and didn’t really have a reason to learn something else. The third time I tried was early 2012 when I started reading iOS Programming. This time I needed a project or I’d fail yet again.

I’m going to quickly walk you through how to build a server-side Facebook registration flow with Django. This is really basic and doesn’t rely on special libraries aside from httplib2 and urlib which are pretty standard. First you need to create an app. I set my App Domain to localhost and Site URL to http://localhost:8000 for development purposes. You’ll probably need to do the same if you’re using Django’s built in development server.

While trying to figure this out I came across a great article by Matthijs Hollemans. I suggest following it if you’re interested in an in-depth tutorial. What follows is a more concise version of that article and instead of using PHP I’m using a variant of Jacky Tsoi’s Python script. This is pretty tedious and there are a lot of steps you have to get right in order for this to work properly so hang in there.

It took me a few evenings to figure this out so I’m writing a quick explanation based on what I’ve found to work. My use-case is pretty simple, I want to POST some data to a form on a server from an iOS app I’m building. I’ll be using NSURLRequest to build the request object and NSURLConnection to make the actual connection to the server. The first thing we need to understand is how Multipart Form requests should be structured.