Question

I’d like to append some text from my iPhone app, to a file that already exists on my webserver. What’s the easiest way to do so? I don’t want you to write me code, just give me pointers on where to start and what I need running on my webserver (PHP?)

Initially, each app can post to a different file (i can figure out some unique identifier to help me with this). Later I may wish to have all the data written to the same file, in which case I would need to be careful of concurrent access.

Also, I am not sure how authentication should work; should I require each user or app to have a different account and password, which would be hard to do since then I would need a way to create accounts from within the app. Or I could embed a default username&password for all users, into the app – but that may open me up to some security issues.

What else am I missing?

EDIT: I’m dropping the iOS tag as I think that this is more of a webserver question, and not an iOS question.

Answer 1

Well, in order to append a string to a file on your server I’d have to say the easiest method is to send that string as a parameter of a HTTP request to your server. And then the server does the appending.

For authentication I think it would be best from a user experience point of view to use OpenID. That will provide you some kind of authentication and you would differentiate between your users but still , very important , will allow users to use their current accounts. I hate it when every service on the web requires me to make a new account just for that thing.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!