Hosting a web service for an iPhone App

Question

I need to write a fairly simple Delivery Tracking application. The device needs to know information about the 'matters' such as status (delivered/awaiting delivery), type (for delivery/for pickup), address, payment accepted etc.

The iPhone part of the app seems very simple but in terms of hosting some kind of web service is the part I am unsure about.

Does Apple have some kind of service or recommending way of handling this?

The web service would need to store all the information about the matters and receive updates from the device when matters are delivered and then there is a possibility that new matters could be sent out manually from the depot.

These are the parts I am unsure about - any ideas?

Answer 1

There is no Apple recommended way or service. For a similar system to the one you are proposing I have a Ruby On Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/) backend application with MySQL database hosted by a third party. It took me a couple of weeks starting from no knowledge of RoR to get the Rails App and database up and running. I recommend Appress's Beginning Rails 3 as a good book to start with. You can develop and run Ruby On Rails on MacOSX and easily port your app to a Linux server when it sufficiently developed.

There are other web-services frameworks such as PHP or ASP.NET which you could use so long as they return data in the form of JSON or XML.

The Ruby on Rails app can render JSON or XML when the iPhone app sends a request via NSURLRequest. I'm using Objective Resource (http://iphoneonrails.com/) which takes care of a lot of work connecting to RoR backend but you can use the many open source JSON frameworks such as TouchJSON (http://github.com/schwa/TouchJSON) or use NSXMLParser, an Apple Objective-C class, if your request returns in the form of XML.