Server for mobile and web applications

I'm planning on constructing a large application. It will have a browser based interface along with a mobile application interface (iOS, Android, blackberry).

I would like to be able to push data from the server onto these inte开发者_高级运维rfaces, and there will be a lot of data being sent from the mobile apps back to the server. So my question is what kind of server am I looking to build.

I'm a PHP developer mainly, though I can write in Java and have dabbled in others. I'm fine with learning a new language. My thoughts as a PHP developer is that I could just build a PHP application and use it's API to power the other interfaces.

However there will be a lot of data moving around and I don't feel like PHP would be the best base for this really. So I'm exploring alternatives. Any thoughts on where to start with this?

you can use a framework like Rhomobile's Rhodes that generates your browser based clients and they also offer a server component: http://rhomobile.com/products/rhosync/

Common practice would be to separate out the backend functionality between different servers.

• Server 1: serve up your static content
• Server 2: serve up your dynamically generated content (things based on queries that require IO such as DB interaction
• Server 3: dedicated realtime infrastructure for the realtime push functionality

Server 1 & 2 could probably be the same server for now but I'd recommend having a dedicated realtime server. Communication between servers is normally done with some sort of message queue although web service calls are also an option.

My area of interest is realtime push so here's a bit more information on that. If you want to stick with PHP there's the phpwebsocket project. If you want to look at Java then there's [WaterSpout}(http://www.spoutserver.com/), jwebsocket and Jetty which has been around for a while and is (or was the last time I checked) used by the Twitter Streaming API.

There are more options for the realtime component of your solution on this Realtime technologies guide which I'm maintaining.