Server-Side Programming for iPhone app?

[russellelly]

Hi all,

I'm attempting a fairly substantial iPhone app for my university project, and am in the middle of the (fairly steep!) learning curve of iPhone programming.

I'm basically creating a social network (don't worry, it's got a twist - I'm honestly not re-inventing the wheel!) through iPhones, which will obviously need some server involved. Is there anything stopping me using Java as my server language and having the iPhones connecting to the server through the C Berkley Sockets API? Everything I can find about Java Servers is about Tomcat and the like, but I don't think that's really appropriate (I don't want to generate HTML for one!) - is there a fundamental reason why having a ['normal'] Java program constantly running on a box acting as a server would be a bad idea? The specific reason I'd rather do Java is my experience of the language and of JDBC.

Any advice welcome before I proceed head first into this!!!

[robbieduncan]

You can write the server end using anything you want.

[iSee]

Especially if the client (iPhone) drives the interactions, consider using http requests rather than sockets directly. This will save you work on both the client and server sides.