Question

Alrighty, let’s try this again!

I’m currently developing an application that will be relying on a web server for some of its functionality. I’m interested, however, in transmitting the user’s location to other users who request it. What would be the best possible way to implement this in the application? Thank you! 😀

Answer 1

If I were making this application for a standard linux server, I would have a MySQL table called locations, or users. Inside that table, I would store the device id, the latitude, longitude, and date of the users’ location. Then, when a user’s location changes, update the entry in the table using a HTTP request to a PHP script.

As far as the programming, look into NSURLRequests and NSURLConnections. You would need to do a POST or GET, including this information. This might be an example of the requests:

{ /* Update Location: http://hostname/path/location.php */
  action = "updatelocation",
  deviceid = "635262f796d3fe35229275d5835bf42861c33f23",
  latitude = 0,
  longitude = 0
}

Processing on the server wouldn’t be too hard. That should at least get you started on storing the locations. Letting other users request the locations would be a little harder.