iPhone / Android: what protocol stacks do apps use for connecting to centralised services?

Question

Hi All,

Aplogies for the ignorant question, I have no experience with app development on any mobile platform. Basically what I want to know is what communication protocols do apps typically use for accessing/querying centralised services? E.g if I port a webapp/service to iPhone/Android, typically how would I access/query this web service in my app? E.g is it over HTTP, or are there other protocols?

Also, presumably the GUI of an app is constructed with Apple/Android GUI libraries (in java? cocoa?). Can an app GUI be defined with HTML/javascript like a webpage?

Sorry again for the pure noob questions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your question is pretty broad as you can really implement it however you want, but in my own experience the majority of "centralized" services are accessed directly over HTTP using an HTTP networking library or NSURLConnection. Most of the web services I work with are RESTful. Some people might implement with straight sockets, but that's just pain and would be best avoided if possible.

The GUI side is done using Cocoa Touch on the iPhone. I'm not sure about Android. You can certainly implement a web based app targeted specifically for iPhone. In fact there's been a lot in the news lately about developing HTML5 apps for the iPhone and iPad.