CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ioswebweb-applications
Shaun
Shaun

Reputation: 804

How do can I create web pages on the fly from an iOS app?

Context/Background: I have an iOS app with a Firebase backend. Each user on the app has a couple of public stories or journals. I am working on the v2 of the app and one of the main features of v2 is to give users the ability to publish their stories as static webpages by a click of a button. The goal is to have a journal for a user with a username "johnhouse", for example, be available at www.the-app-domain.com/johnhouse.

Question: How do can I create web pages on the fly from an iOS app? Im not sure where to start. Which online services should I look at?

I thought of spinning up a server and hosting www.the-app-domain.com on it, getting the app to ssh into the server and creating a directory called "johnhouse" (from the example above) inside the website's root directory and then pasting an index.html file inside it, But this doesn't only sound like a bad idea, it also sounds complicated as hell If I were to generate the html files on the app, how would I get them to the server? how would I get them into the right location?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 88

Answers (1)

Jonah
Jonah

Reputation: 17958

There are a great many ways you might implement this behavior but I'll suggest one.

Consider what this product might look like if the app had no knowledge of how these static pages were published. All the app needs to be able to do is allow users to set which of their stories are published or not and to inform those users of the url at which their published stories will be available.

There may be real advantages to removing the app from your page-creation process.

  • If you find that you need to make change to the formatting of your pages you can do so without requiring an app update and you can choose if you want to rebuild every page or just have changes apply to new pages. This might be important if you discover that your pages don't render well on some devices or are not indexed the way you would like by search engines.
  • If you need to change where your pages are hosted you can do so (and provide redirects from the old location) without needing everyone to update to a new app version.
  • If you need to add moderation or curation of the content you publish you can do so more easily than if clients (your app) have direct control of your site content. This may be important when someone starts publishing SEO spam links to your site, or registers the username admin or login, or publishes a story containing malicious javascript, or publishes content which gets you a copyright infringement notice.
  • You don't need to give clients direct access to your web server which could allow them to edit each other's content or overwrite your site with their own malicious content.

Since you're already using Firebase take a look at how you might run your own web server as another client of this backend. One which looks for "published" stories (however you identify those in your data model) and generates appropriate pages for them. Depending on the tools you elect to use these could be dynamically generated pages (client side js or a web app) or static pages build by some backend process periodically or whenever stories change and added to a web server. Without any idea what server side tools would be most appropriate for you it's hard to know what specifically to suggest here.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions