setting up server for an iphone app

super basic question - I am building an iphone a开发者_StackOverflow中文版pp but will need to set up my computer as a server so my app can send data to my computer. what are the first steps that i need to take?

Thanks!

If you are writing an iPhone app you are probably on a Macbook so you can easily enable Apache in system preferences, click sharing, enable web sharing it will then show you your computers IP address that you can hit over a web browser.

That will set you up with a web server on your machine. Since your emulator and web server will be on the same wifi network and even if you deploy to the device you can have it on your wifi network you should be able to post data to your Mac's web server.

If you are passing data to it you'll need to read about 'web services', probably REST web services. I would then suggest reading about PHP and/or Ruby or Python as your programming language to interpret what you are posting to the web service.

Hope that helps you on your way.

If you are not on a Mac you can't develop an iPhone app anyways ;) so the above strategy should work for you.

3G will only work for you if your server is available outside of the network. Tons of info online on how to set that up but essentially what you would do is configure your router to forward incoming traffic from (for example) port 8080 to the ip address of your server. Assuming you are on a router.

As a side note, if down the line you use Ruby you could check out http://www.heroku.com/how if you want to host your server there