iPad client development possible?

[apocryphx]

I am wondering if it might be possible to write a native iOS client for OMERO.
Conceptually I would use ICE touch and compile the .ice files (under components/blitz/resources/omero) into Obj-C. Then I would use the generated files to perform remote communication with the OMERO server. Is there any general reason why this approach would not work? I am new to ICE and the OMERO API.

[jmoore]

Conceptually, it should certainly work, and we'd love to see the results. There are definitely gotchas though. Because of the complexity of the model objects, we've added methods to the slice definitions which force all the generated classes to be abstract. We have a second layer of code-generation which produces concrete subclasses of these abstract types. That would need to be done for Obj-C as well.

I'll let someone else comment on the specifics, but at the moment, we're trying to generally improve the mobile experience of OMERO.web. Do you think that would be another route?

Cheers,
~Josh

[wmoore]

I don't know much about iOS apps, but presumably they could work from web services? This would allow you to extend the existing OMERO.web Python/Django framework to provide the data and images you want from OMERO, without having to compile ICE / Obj-C.