Looking for some server side guidance

Atomic Pineapple

I'm wondering if anyone could help me out with some guidance by pointing me in the right direction on some server side development I want to start soon.

I have been developing mobile apps for almost 4 years now since I finished college and I have been primarily client side based with very little exposure to server side coding and technologies.

To counter this I have two mobile applications I am looking at developing over the next year which will require me to develop the server side components for storing and retrieving secure data.

Since I have little exposure to server side stuff I'm a little unsure what the best way to approach it is and I was hoping for some opinions and guidance on what is best.

For the apps I will require the ability to hold interactions and conversations between users server side, I guess what I would require would closely match that a dating website would have server side.

I would also require the ability to upload, store and present lots and lots of pictures, I'm talking more albums here rather than profiles, the apps aren't actually dating ones just the back end requirements would closely match what a dating one would require.

I am quite comfortable using PHP and MySQL and I am aware I could do a lot this way but I was wondering how best to deal with scalability just in case the apps become popular and if there is a better approach? Also what services out there are best to check out for hosting and how much is it likely to cost? Is it possible to start out small at a relatively low cost without making scalability an issue? Are there better approaches than PHP and MySQL?

Anything else you think might be useful for please share, I am really looking to expand my server side coding experience and anything from tutorials to recommended books would also be highly appreciated

ChRoMe

draffodx wrote: »

I'm wondering if anyone could help me out with some guidance by pointing me in the right direction on some server side development I want to start soon.

I have been developing mobile apps for almost 4 years now since I finished college and I have been primarily client side based with very little exposure to server side coding and technologies.

To counter this I have two mobile applications I am looking at developing over the next year which will require me to develop the server side components for storing and retrieving secure data.

Since I have little exposure to server side stuff I'm a little unsure what the best way to approach it is and I was hoping for some opinions and guidance on what is best.

For the apps I will require the ability to hold interactions and conversations between users server side, I guess what I would require would closely match that a dating website would have server side.

I would also require the ability to upload, store and present lots and lots of pictures, I'm talking more albums here rather than profiles, the apps aren't actually dating ones just the back end requirements would closely match what a dating one would require.

I am quite comfortable using PHP and MySQL and I am aware I could do a lot this way but I was wondering how best to deal with scalability just in case the apps become popular and if there is a better approach? Also what services out there are best to check out for hosting and how much is it likely to cost? Is it possible to start out small at a relatively low cost without making scalability an issue? Are there better approaches than PHP and MySQL?

Anything else you think might be useful for please share, I am really looking to expand my server side coding experience and anything from tutorials to recommended books would also be highly appreciated

What languages have you been using for mobile development?

Atomic Pineapple

ChRoMe wrote: »

What languages have you been using for mobile development?

Java on Android and Objective c on iOS

ChRoMe

draffodx wrote: »

Java on Android and Objective c on iOS

I'd look at Java,Apache CXF to expose functionality as a webservice for the clients and hibernate for persistence.

Graham

Have a look at some of the 'mobile back end as a service' operations out there, most of them come bundled with messaging, authentication, data storage, Facebook/Twitter integration iOS/Android integration , push notifications etc etc etc. Often the first million or so API calls each month will be free.

No need to worry about back-end infrastructure, rapidly scaleable etc etc etc and if you do get to the stage where you're hitting the 'have to pay' points you'll hopefully have planned your monetisation strategy accordingly.

I've been playing with Parse.com for the last few months, fairly impressed so far but there's at least another dozen operators in the market.

Atomic Pineapple

Parse looks pretty interesting for a free service to start with! Would it be able to handle storage of lots of pictures though? One of the apps will be very heavily picture orientated around users uploading pictures and being able to view them in groups.

Graham

You could probably back off the photo storage to something like amazon S3. I'd imagine you'll need to do something like that whatever solution you end up going for.