iOS Xcode connecting to MySQL database

Here are two great tutorials that helped me a lot

How To Write A Simple PHP/MySQL Web Service for an iOS App

How to Write an iOS App That Uses a Web Service

There are no "over the air" APIs that will let you connect directly to a MySQL database. Instead, what you could do is create a RESTful web service in front of the database that returns the data as JSON via a request from an NSURLRequest object.

By normally connection via PHP, what you actually mean is you had done web development. This means there was a server, and a database.

There's no available server in the iOS runtime that will allow you to install PHP or MySQL.

You can't do it...

But, you could make your php and database on a server, and connect to it via the network from your app.

My suggestion is to look what kind of database you need, if it's for school and it isn't really interactive with the outside world, then use SQLite in your app, it's an embedded database so it's on the phone, as quick as you can want, no networking and you can obviously leverage your SQL knowledge.

If you want to make an API or, server with your php things, you really are giving yourself a lot of extra work.

You need to create an NSMutableURLRequest and initialize an NSURLConnection with it to send an HTTP message. Something like that:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://xyz.com"];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self];