How to make a chat system on iPhone?

Question

I\'m doing research for making a chat based app for the iPhone (it\'s not really text chat in the regular sense, but the principles are the same).

Maximum 6 people

Answer 1

I think you can either go with push notifications, or XMPP (Jabber) server.

XMPP will allow your iphone app to receive data even when in the background using the new multitasking features (listening for a socket), and i'm pretty sure you should find ready to use servers for LAMP (or at least open source implementations).

Note that the iOS4 multitasking API doesn't support polling in the background, so your only other option should be push notifications. If you're new to push notifications, you can maybe use a service like Urban Airship that might make the process easier.