A new Project raised behind the horizon. Since two months the student Daniel L. and myself are working on an iPhone App for our students.

The Name is secret (for now) so I call it” The APP.” 🙂

Currently we have more or less finished with the application design and now we have started with the implementation of  the first prototype. As the mobile part heavily depends on remote data we also needed a Backend for the core data distribution. Daniel is currently working on the implementation of the iPhone part, and I’m working on the server Backend.

We needed some kind of webservice infrastructure to get the data to/from the mobile application. I have chosen Tomcat for our Server infrastructure, maybe with Apache as first responder. The used framework for the stuff behind is Restlet. The Backend is designed to response with XML or JSON  plain/gzipped  data formats, depending on the received Accept Headers.

Representational State Transfer ( Rest )  is build around around the transfer of “representations” of “resources”. A resource is mostly an URI endpoint if we use HTTP.  Compared to SOAP RPC every developer has to design and implement his own set of functions which represent the interaction interface between the web. App. and the backend. Rest uses the existing HTTP “methods” GET, POST, PUT, DELETE as the command interface. Really cool 🙂 Rest responses are not limited to HTML one can use XML, JSON, binary…

more to come…

have fun