Re: Client/Server Design
Re: Client/Server Design
- Subject: Re: Client/Server Design
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 11:24:39 -0700
On May 5, 2010, at 5:27 AM, Phillip Mills wrote:
> I have ideas for a number of different applications that share a general architecture: use an iPhone as a remote data-collection front end to a Mac app that does more complicated processing, or to a general purpose application such as a spreadsheet or database, or to a variety of apps that each do their own specific processing (*nix style). The core feature in all of this is a need for easy file or document transmission between the systems.
OS 3.2 (i.e. the iPad, for now) supports document sharing. While the device is docked the user can use iTunes to (clumsily) transfer files between the Mac filesystem and the app’s Documents folder. Apps like Pages and GoodReader use this.
The UI for this is currently really bad, as in “I can’t believe this came from Apple”, but I can only assume that’s because they haven’t had time to get it right yet, but had to ship it anyway because it’s pretty crucial for the iWork apps. So I strongly expect/hope it will work more smoothly on the Mac side in the future.
The alternatives all involve network transfer, either up to a server or directly to the user’s computer. For a server you’d probably want to use a straight HTTP POST, which any web app will understand; if connecting to the user’s computer you’ll need a small listener app to run there and handle the data transfer. Greg already mentioned BLIP, a high-level messaging protocol, which is implemented in my MYNetwork library for Mac and iPhone:
http://bitbucket.org/snej/mynetwork/
—Jens_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden