Tweeder is a simple iOS project demonstrating some general concepts that might be found in an app similar to the Twitter app. The primary goals were to demonstrate the following ideas:

• Account creation and login
• Displaying a list of tweets or messages made by the current user
• Refreshing the list with only tweets that have not been fetched from the server before
• Posting a new tweet

This is a pretty basic MVC iOS app. I also built a very simple server API in PHP that is included in this repository. The API functions have some hard-coded paths that will be a problem if you actually try to deploy this to another server. The goal of this project was not to demonstrate a server component, but to show how to implement a fairly basic app that makes calls to a remote service, so the service itself is extremly simplistic.

I made some very simplified technical design decisions while building this sample app. First off, most of the unit tests are very simplistic and test the happy path in most cases. The API layer doesn't make a great effort to notify the user of truly exceptional failures such as network timeouts and has absolutely no handling of offline mode.

The majority of my work is focused on the functional aspects of the app. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the cell layout in the main tableview, nor did I try to develop an overal layout theme. I did try to make it look at least presentable, though, while focusing primarily on the core functionality.

I did not provide nice messages for all API failures. Some API failures report nothing more than an error code to the user.

After successful login, the username is passed back to the server on most requests (instead of using some sort of session token) for simplicity. In a real app, I would expect the login service to return a token to be used in the headers (or bodies) of the subsequent API requests. The server would then be able to expire the session token for security.

Local data is stored in NSUserDefaults or flat files (JSON).

This project uses two libraries that I've used in the past:

• AFNetworking
• IQKeyboardManager

Both are included as Podfiles, so to build, you must first pod install. I did not include all of the Pod/* files in the repo, just the Podfile itself. I am using pod version 0.39.0.

AFNetworking provides the core networking functionality for the API calls I make. It handles JSON deserialization from the server.

IQKeyboardManager helps manage scrolling when the keyboard appears. I use this frequently to minimize the boilerplate code required for to ensure that input fields aren't hidden under the keyboard.

I built the app to work in all standard orientations on both iPhone and iPad.

Pull to refresh is enabled on the tableview. Try running the app on two devices with the same account, then post from one device and pull to refresh on the other. Fun!

I have included some unit/integration tests for this project that test the basics of the API.

I made no effort on the server side to secure anything. I also did very, very little in terms of exception handling. I tried to build the most basic REST service using PHP that met the minimum needs of this sample project and demonstrate some generally-accepted REST principles. All responses are either a simple HTTP status code or a JSON response object.

I have deployed the API code to a public server, so there is no need to actually set up a new API server to test this project.