Question

I’m interested in having clients, on iOS/OS X platforms using Cocoa, having secure transaction with a dedicated server. I’m looking for the easiest and most ‘proper’ use of the fancy highly abstracted APIs that Apple has developed. An example of what I’m talking about with those “fancy” APIs is that https is implemented “for free” and could suit my purposes – except that I don’t know how to implement the corresponding server portion of that?

The network messages basically need to be a secure session where a client can create an account, or log in with that account, can send a request to the server, and receive a response from the server. The traffic is low volume, latency is OK, most important thing is to implement confidentiality and to make my software effort as short as possible.

The server will be on FreeBSD and will either run Cocoa via Cocotron or can use some other technology you mention that would make development faster. The computation being done on the server is minimal, requires db intfc, etc.

Answer 1

On the client side, NSURLRequest and NSURLConection all support HTTPS mode. You could also try third party libraries such as ASIHTTPRequest.

On the server side, I’m not sure what you mean by “The server will be on FreeBSD and will either run Cocoa via Cocotron”. Are you saying that your server will be written in Objective-C and using Cocoa API? I’m not really sure why you want to do something like that. If the code on server is minimal, why not use the Apache server combined with mod_ssl and perhaps PHP to get it done? PHP is excellent for quick and dirty server. You can also use django / rails and other established frameworks (all of which support HTTPS) if those suit your need better.