How can I build/install/run a server program to communicate with the iPhone?

Question

I'd like to play with the idea of creating a server program that communicates with an iPhone app over socket connections. I've found several guides within Apple's documentation for client side programming (with CFNetwork, NSStream, etc) but I don't know where to begin on programming the server application, or even what language to use, or for that matter, how to deploy and run a server application on my current web hosting package through Go Daddy. A simple instant messenger style application example should get me started, but any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

if you want to create socket connection is better to use CFNetwork , it has more flexibility for you I already used NSURLConnection but CFNetwork has better performance. this is my steps and how I developed my app :

1. configuration of server
2. selection C++ for my server side (service)
3. start to develop a client-side app for iphone to connect to server using NS classes but I had some problems in sending and receiving message to and form server . so I changed it to CF classes it works better and faster now.

Answer 2

The easiest way to handle server-to-device communications is to use APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).

Communication in the other direction (device-to-server) can be handled simply with NSUrlConnection.

If you want to write your own socket code for this, well - good luck with that.

Answer 3

Do you want your client application to be able to run on more than one OS? If so, you might want to stay clear of anything Apple specific. Although, if you strictly want to run on iOS, using MusiGenesis' suggestion could save you a ton of time.

I have found that Python and Perl are both pretty great for socket programming. I know that Python has several libraries built in for handling HTTP requests etc. If you want to run your server as a daemon, I found this code very helpful: http://www.jejik.com/articles/2007/02/a_simple_unix_linux_daemon_in_python/

Here is a general python sockets guide: http://docs.python.org/howto/sockets.html

Good luck.