From my understanding you cannot socket a connection between two iPhones (correct me if I’m wrong). So what I would like to do is have one server sitting between the client application that accepts messages and redistributes them to the appropriate person(s). Essentially the application is going to allow people to have a shared map that has their locations and everyone can annotate it.
1) I have been reading and researching into the CFStream class, but I’m curious to know if it might be better to just use the C send() and recv() functions. They almost seem much easier to use. What does CFStream offer over the native C socket functions that make it a better option?
2) Since I need the phone to actively listen for updated shared user locations/new annotations from other users, my plan was to periodically have the phone poll the server for any “news” from other users (say every minute or two). Is there anyway the phone could spin off a new thread in the application that is constantly waiting for incoming traffic? It would make life easier to be able to have a user annotate the map, push that to the server which then immediately updates the appropriate users maps.
I have been using example socket code from Jonathan Zdziarski’s iPhone SDK book from O’Rielly Media to just try sending messages between a server and iPhone emulator (the classic knock knock joke server/client). However, after sending 1 or 2 messages the server gets stuck “receiving.” The code runs perfectly when not sent from an emulator, as I can seemly spam the client send function and get a response from the server each time. Could the server be hanging because I use send() and recv() instead of the CFRead and Write stream?
You can socket iPhone applications using bonjour, or even GameKit (which is what I use because it manages all data for you).