Ok. Here is my situation:
I am developing an embedded device, which provide a service. It will provide some web based services to a client (a smart phone).
Currently we are planning to implement a REST server in the device so that web applications can easily access and use the services provided by the device.
In the future, we plan to add a display and a better processor to our embedded device so that we can run the web applications on the device itself.
We want to maintain application compatibility - i.e all the current web applications should work on the device without any modifications.
Is there a better way to implement this than using REST and HTTP? I am worried about performance running both the server and the client on the device.
If you take care to separate the REST Api code from the actual service code, your newer device can interface (direct call) directly with the service instead of wrapping everything into HTTP and REST.
This being said, you can always try an implementation using you REST api and validate if performance is adequate. If it is, you do not even need to add the indirection.
Related
I want to use an ios application like proxy. There will be various application installed on same device and all applications will communicate with server via proxy application.
I will send request to proxy application, Proxy application will handle request, send it to servers and send response to the various applications.
When I use URLScheme this will launch application and bringd it front. I dont want applciation launch.Is it possible to make this? Use an application lie a service?
The AppSupport framework exposes an Objective-C class suited for interprocess communication: CPDistributedMessagingCenter. You can read about its usage and details about how it is implemented here.
For sign-in across many apps, you should be using the KeychainManager and a shared sub-domain with an entitlement linking the apps together with a keychain-access-group.
See How to share keychain data between iOS applications
I'm developing an application for Windows Mobile 6.5 that needs to get and send data from a Postgres database within the network of the app.
I've googled it and read every page on the matter but haven't been able to find a solution.
The npgsql driver doesn't work on this sdk.
Much like for Android or iOS, I'd recommend that you build an intermediary web service that's provided by a server on the Internet that the phones talk to instead of talking directly to the database. The web service would accept REST+JSON, REST+XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, or whatever your preferred web service procotol is from the phone clients. It'd act on the requests from the phones, doing whatever is needed in the database to satisfy the request, and return any result via the web service protocol.
This means your individual phones don't need connections direct to PostgreSQL - a good thing, since phone network connections are flakey and the retry/re-establish logic can be hard to get right. You'd land up with lots of dangling connections to the Pg server. You're much better off with a stateless protocol like HTTP to talk to a web service that then does the real work.
Choose whatever web service protocol is easiest to work with on Windows Phone 6.5 and implement it using your preferred back-end server. In your case I imagine that's likely to be .NET on IIS.
Depending on the app, you might already have a web service protocol. If you have a modern web page version then it's fairly likely to use JavaScript with REST+JSON to call server endpoints, in which case you may just be able to extend and re-use those for the phone app.
Is there a framework that supports publishing (pushing) messages from a WCF service (REST or SOAP) to various clients like IPhone, Android and WP7? I'm thinking I can use the WSDualHttpBinding to do dual communication between WCF and WP7. However, I'm assuming WSDualHttpBinding is not supported in the other two platforms since is not a WS-* standard and there's a lot of stuff that WCF does to establish a receiving channel on the client side. Is there any other way to accomplish this? How would I about rolling my own?
I'm thinking about exposing my WCF service as a restful endpoint and implement a COMET style pub/sub and calling it good.
I'm stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Since you already have a solution for WP7, you could probably use urbanairship.com to handle the pushes for iPhone and Android. I've used them on a prior project with good results. (I don't work for them.)
I found this "Cloud to Device Messaging", C2DM, yesterday and thought it may serve your question:
http://www.makeurownrules.com/archives/category/android
Have you considered using SignalR? It'll fallback gracefully from WebSockets & Server-Side Events through to long polling. There's a mono implementation of the client-side library.
We're successfully using it in a large-scale realtime application and it works a treat. A bit further down this page it details how to communicate with clients from outside the SignalR infrastructure which may be useful if you want to talk to clients from your WCF service.
Cheers,
Dean
I am a new programmer who is new to iPhone development and server stuff. I have a lot of questions to ask.
You don't have to answer all the questions; any help is appreciated!
How does iPhone apps interact with server?
Is there a particular kind of server i should use to interact iphone app with server?
If there is no particular kind of server then what kind of server can be used?
What are their advantages and disadvantages?
What should the iPhone app (which is the client) do in order to interact with the server?
How does the server know which iPhone to send data to?
What should the server do in order to interact with iPhone app (client)?
Your best bet is to have your iPhone make web requests of a web server. Your iPhone app acts just like a web browser, making http requests to a web server, and parsing the response.
I'm building an app right now that hits PHP scripts I've written that do database work, etc, and return JSON objects. It's not fancy--I could have built a whole SOAP or RPC web service, but I didn't do that, it just makes GET requests with query-string arguments.
There are handy libraries you want to know about. Google "iPhone JSON" to find the JSON library written by Stig Brautaset, that's the one most people seem to be using. Also, rather than putting yourself through all the hoops that the iPhone's built-in web client framework requires, go get ASIHTTPRequest, a very powerful and MUCH simplified web client library.
As a general rule, you want to do as much processing on the server as possible. For instance, there's a place in my app I'm searching for events happening within a user-specified range of their local coordinates ("within 10 miles of me"). I wrote PHP to build a latitude/longitude bounding box, and query from the database based on that. That's WAY faster than bringing a bunch of events down and then asking Core Location to calculate their distance from where I'm standing.
You've asked quite a few questions so I'll try my best to answer them all:
First, you need to be a bit clearer, what type of server are you talking about? Email server, web server, lolcat server, it depends.
At the basic level, the iphone communicates over the internet. The internet uses Internet Protocol, and there are two standard protocols built atop of IP: Transmission Control Protocol, and User Datagram Protocol. Each has it's own uses and functions.
TCP/IP and UDP/IP make up the backbone of internet communication.
A more specific application protocol is built atop of these two internet protocols, with a specific format to a given application. For example, HTTP is the standard protocol for transferring HTML and other Web information between a web server to a web browser client, over TCP.
So, your iPhone would use whatever protocol is required to commuincate with the server. For more common server communication, the iOS SDK provides methods to construct messages (for example if you wish to make an HTTP request to a web server, you can use initWithContentsOfURL to send a GET request).
If you built a custom server, then you will need construct the required message protocol on the iphone, and send it to the server, using either TCP or UDP (whatever your custom server expects).
Do most of the popular iPhone apps that communicate with a back end Internet server communicate via web services? I was assuming this was the case.
Some apps I'm thinking about would be: Facebook, Bloomberg, NY Times, ESPN, etc.
Well a web service is just an API - Application Programming Interface
The apps you mentioned would probably all implement their own API for exchanging data between the client and the server so yeah, I would say the answer is yes. You can implement your own API via XML, JSON etc. You just need to define the protocol. You can implement existing concepts in your own apps. Have a look at the following:
REST
SOAP
JSON
Most of the Apps that I've written use web services of some sort, I prefer being RESTful, but I have been forced to use SOAP.