iPhone developers will need servers to push

Ok, im a little suprised by Erica here because looking through the specifications of what Apple expects form the developer is literally bits of info. And they wont be pushing anything to the developer. The developer is expected to poll the feedback service to find any non responding devices that need to stop getting notifications (so as to limit the needless notifications sent to Apple).

Sure, you will need an active server to push these things but we arent talking data center, fiber connections with Atlanta highway sized bandwidth. We are talking shared hosting using mysql and php and a cron job. I already do that with my app that updates scores. Weaksauce Erica.

I was very glad to see that Erica had stopped posting to this blog. Please don't post her drivel here.

If you had an app that really needed to run in the bg or use push just stop and thing for a sec, what would consume more bandwidth? Push or an open socket the WHOLE time? Also amazon web services seems like a good idea, but you also pay for put/get requests so I don't know if that is very cost effective or even matters when doing pushes.

The thing I thing the original poster was trying to say was, if push is something that costs a decent chunk of $ maybe it won't be over used like a lot if us are predicting.

This is the most confusing 'non-news' that I have ever seen. We've always known that we would have to publish events to the phone. The Apple push servers couldn't "use the force" and pass our applications data on for us.

If the whole point was to allow applications to run in the background and send/receive data, how is this materially more expensive to the developers than would have been otherwise? You were going to have to push data to those those devices or those devices would have been polling from some service(s) you were running.

Love ya Erica, but you this argument doesn't make sense.

Google's App Engine is perfect for this: Hosted, scalable, free up to a generous amount, and when it's time to pay, it's relatively cheap; the developer only pays for what he/she uses, and can even set budgets. Unless I'm missing something, the App Engine seems perfectly suited to small developers wanting to set up a push notification service of some sort.

And as others have rightly pointed out: if you're not already a web developer of some sort, and don't already offer some sort of online service to users, you're not likely to even need push notification.

Uh, why do you need push notifications if your app isn't a native interface for a web app? If you've got a web app, you've got servers, and adding an API call to the notification service in a few functions (user gets a message) is very simple.

It's not nearly as easy as people think it is. My entire world is web hosting and networking!

First most of the scripts (under NDA) that push are php/perl and require certain libraries that most hosts won't have on a shared $10/month hosting account.

2nd - I can't tell you how many iPhone developers have had their websites killed, or accounts terminated on hosting plans because the webhost would get hammered with 2,000 connections, simply because the dev thought they could write a casual non-efficient PHP script.

3rd - Security, most of devs I know, even the big ones had networking as an after thought.

Sure go ahead, $250-$800/month on a dedicated server, remember your going to manage it, secure it, patch it, and if someone gets access to it, or touches it, you could have huge backlash from customers.

It's trickier than you think, Erica was not being sensationalistic. It's a serious issue that needs to be treated a hell of a lot better than "Oh it's easy, just setup a box with some php"

You need to plan a strategy. Pray that your host knows macs, even gets what going on and gives a crap about your account. I know some apps were so poorly written they would die if the connection was down. You have to plan for downtime, your host killing you, your backup, amazon sucking, and other things.

It's a serious issue that shouldn't be taken lightly and as a sort of "anybody can setup a php script on the internet" issue.

Not quite sure what the hang up is here... wouldn't most of the type applications that require push service also require servers/infrastructure for their services anyway? Push would be in addition to standard services, but shouldn't require much extra. For added reliability I suppose these developers could use one of the cloud technology providers to make sure pushes happen...

Why a developer has to use a server to push notifications to To-Do's?

I don't understand the way Apple is going with all this stuff.

If I'm not online I can't have an alarm to sound when I have a meeting?

It's cheap and easy to set this up. I've already done it for one of my apps. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of users, a standard hosting package with SSL will suffice for most applications.