Google Protocol Buffers with Objective-C and Java

Question

I look at establishing a connection between an iPhone application and a Java-based server and thought google protocol buffers might be a way; however, I managed to get a little confused, and I'm not sure if this is the best way to implement this, so I was hoping for some friendly advice :)

Should I configure the Java server as a web service and send it proto-messages (via message or something similar) or configure the client / server with the Java server accepting the connection and then transfer the iPhone Flowing message through the connection? I guess the best way to do this is to create an actual socket connection and send messages back and forth; but I could be wrong and set it up as a web server with messages / responses, which may be the best way.

Any advice on this would really be appreciated.

Thank,

Dan

Answer 1

I think it depends a lot on how you plan to scale your application. The web server designed to run your servlet has baked scalability. If you just use a simple socket listener in a Java application, then where do you bring scalability? There are ways to do this, but you probably won't need to worry about these issues if you just used Tomcat.

The downside is that if you want to deploy something like Tomcat, there is a small part of the learning curve.