Question

I have a ios device and a web service written in php. When the ios device send a request to the web service, the web service will response to that exact ios device. I don’t know how can server send response to that device.
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You can research into each of these individual components:

1) App make a HTTP POST request to web service with a callback delegate method (ASIHttpRequest or AFNetworking)

2) Server receives request, parses it, then constructs a JSON response and return it back to the app automagically (use a web framework)

3) In your app’s delegate callback method, you will parse the JSON data as a NSDictionary. You extract the JSON key-values using [yourDictionary valueForKey:@”name”];, [yourDictionary valueForKey:@”age”], [yourDictionary valueForKey:@”gender”], [yourDictionary valueForKey:@”email”] etc.

Then your app can either show the parsed data on the screen or do other things with it.

EDIT

Since you’re using PHP as the web service language, I recommend using Symfony 2 web framework.

You’ll write something like

// get request
$inputName = $_REQUEST['name'];

// ORM
$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();

// find email based on name
$member = $em->getRepository('MyWebAppWebServiceBundle:Member')->findOneByName($inputName);

...

// construct JSON array
$json = array(
    'id' => $member->getId(),
    'name' => $member->getName(),
    'email' => $member->getEmail()
);

// send the response back to the user as JSON data
$response = new Response(json_encode($json));
$response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');
return $response;

Alternatively, if you want scalable applications, you can use Node.js (server side Javascript)