What are some best-practices for web-based iOS applications?

I have recently started playing around with iOS development and have got most of the basics down. I would however like to know about some best practices and what you guys think is the best in coding practice and application architecture.

What I have in mind is a simple application that gets information from a web server, displays the data to the user, and allows the user to edit the data which must then be updated on the web server.

What I would like to know is:

1) What type of web server / architecture is best suited for something like this? For example, data passing / updating similar to something like the facebook or twitter etc. applications where data is retrieved, potentially updated, and sent back for updating.

2) What type of authentication / security can be built into an application like this? I was thinking something in the line of username / password being stored on the server. O开发者_运维百科bviously the data should be secure when being transfered.

3) Are there any "free" web servers out there to play around with. I'm not building anything enterprise size, just need somewhere to play. Would the Google App Engine be suitable for something like this? What I have thought up to now is that you would probably need to implement a web service or something. Is this correct? Or are there better ways?

4) Are there any good tutorials around? I have started looking at the ones in the apple.com developer center, but I would like to get other people's point of views too.

I realise these are not really programming questions, but I would appreciate any insight that some more experienced iOS developers have. I would like to get the best practices down by incorporating the above into an app.

Thanks!

This doesn't sound like you need an iOS app, more like just a browser based app that works on the iPhone. If you need features like the GPS, Camera, Gyroscope, taking offline things that are native to the phone, then yes build it on iOS.

But if it's a simple web application that performs the operations you mentioned, then you can look at building a mobile web application. The nice thing is that it will work across iPhone, Droid, WiMo 7, really anything that can host a browser.

1) You can pick almost anything you're comfortable with. I program in both ASP.NET and Python for web apps. Personally, I'm building a web app on Django with Python. It's cheap (free) and there are lots of resources for learning as well as an active community.

2) Security is a rather large topic, there are many things beyond authentication and authorization, like cross-site scripting, sql injection, etc that need to be taken into consideration. Django has some things that help with this. But at the simplest you can secure your site with SSL encryption when performing authentication. You should also consider OpenID as an alternative for authentication, like how StackOverflow gives you the option.

3) I do all my "play" on my macbook pro or pc at home. You can do all of this for free on your own machine, and when you're ready to deploy pick a host, like Amazon or something like Media Temple.