Hello I'm trying to begin an iPhone project, but I don't know where to begin.
I want to build a website and on that website is a form where someone can type in information and click submit. When they submit, my iPhone app receives that information and inputs it into the code for the app.
Is this possible? I'm sure it is, but it may not be as easy as I want it to be, and that's fine.
Here's an inline link to MySite if you would like to contact me directly.
No one on stackoverflow is going to tell or show you step by step what to do.
But, I will give you 30,000 ft overview.
Backend: First you create the website with whatever technology you know. Examples in the following:
- PHP
- JavaServer Pages (JSP)
- Active Server Pages (aspx.net)
The website with take user input and store it on the server. You can store it plain text files or some type of relational database management system (rdms). Here are some of the popular ones:
- SQLite
- MySQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL Server
Now, you need someplace to host your website. The place you choose here will also limit the choice of technology/database listed above. Popular cloud environment are:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) (Free Usage Tier for 12 months)
- Google App Engine, You can create 10 application for free. Note: I am not talking about Google App Engine for Business which is totally different.
- Windows Azure, (Free trial thru to Sept. 30, 2011)
- Custom infrastructure using a web hosting company. For example 1and1.com (No free stuff)
I like the cloud platform because they offer free usage for small websites that have little traffic. Free is great when you first starting out. And when your website/app get popular it will scale across their infrastructure automatically.
Frontend: This is the client portion of your system. In this case an iPhone App. You could also expand to an Android App or BlackBerry platform once your system becomes popular.
I am just going to give an overview for iPhone/iOS app design. THe app can be create in one of two ways. Polling or Push. Polling is when the user, you, starts the app (bring to foreground) and hit the refresh button. At that point, the app connects to the backend pulls down any new data from your database. Push is when the backend sends a notification to your device when new data has been submitted to the database. Basically giving you an alert. The app on your device doesn't have to be running to receive this alert.
That is what I call the 30,000 ft overview. Now you will have to break this down into smaller concret building blocks and tackle them one at a time. The implementation is in the details.
Good luck.
From what I understand, it would make more sense for the data from the form to be submitted into some kind of a database. Then the iPhone app can access this data and do something with it.
Other options:
- Create an RSS feed on your web server. The app can read that feed.
- Have some CSV or XML file on your server that the app can read
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