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POTCP-based RPC server (Erlang or something similar?) for iOS/Android app communication
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copied!<p>I'm building native mobile applications in both iOS and Android. These apps require "realtime" updates from and to the server, same as any other network-based application does (Facebook, Twitter, social games like Words with Friends, etc)</p> <p>I think using HTTP long polling for this is over kill in the sense that long polling can be detrimental to battery life, especially with a lot of TCP setup/teardown. It might make sense to have the mobile applications use persistent TCP sockets to establish a connection to the server, and send RPC style commands to the server for all web service communication. This ofcourse, would require a server to handle the long-lived TCP connection and be able to speak to a web service once it makes sense of the data passed down the TCP pipe. I'm thinking of passing data in plain text using JSON or XML.</p> <p>Perhaps an Erlang based RPC server would do well for a network based application like this. It would allow for the mobile apps to send and receive data from the server all over one connection without multiple setup/teardown that individual HTTP requests would do using something like NSURLConnection on iOS. Since no web browser isn't involved, we don't need to deal with the nuances of HTTP at the mobile client level. A lot of these "COMET" and long-polling/streaming servers are built with HTTP in mind. I'm thinking just using a plain-text protocol over TCP is good enough, will make the client more responsive, allow for receiving of updates from the server, and preserve battery life over the traditional long polling and streaming models.</p> <p>Does anyone currently do this with their native iOS or Android app? Did you write your own server or is there something open sourced out there that I can begin working with today instead of reinventing the wheel? Is there any reason why using just a TCP based RPC service is a worse decision than using HTTP?</p> <p>I also looked into HTTP pipelining, but it doesn't look to be worth the trouble when it comes to implementing it on the clients. Also, I'm not sure if it would allow for bi-directional communication in the client<->server communication channel.</p> <p>Any insight would be greatly appreciated. </p>

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