General advice on how to create a peer-to-peer messaging app?

[pufftissue]

Hi everyone,

I need to create a basic secure messaging app between people. I'd appreciate general advice as to how to build this app. It can be very basic.

Specs:
A text-message like app where you can pick the name of a person, and send a messsage to them, and the person can send a reply back.

What networking APIs do I use for this? Gamekit (seems only to be only for bluetooth), CFNetwork? Push notifications? Bonjour?

Should I do a peer-peer or a client-server model? If I need to create a server, what would be the steps required to do that?

Could someone point me out to a good and recent (SDK 3 or 4) tutorial and/or the juicy parts of the documentation? I see a ton of networking documentation and I'm not really sure which parts I need to read.

A general plan of attack would be met with great glee(the more detailed, the more I will hug you)!

Thanks!

[jonahgabriel]

Originally Posted by pufftissue

Hi everyone,

I need to create a basic secure messaging app between people. I'd appreciate general advice as to how to build this app. It can be very basic.

Specs:
A text-message like app where you can pick the name of a person, and send a messsage to them, and the person can send a reply back.

What networking APIs do I use for this? Gamekit (seems only to be only for bluetooth), CFNetwork? Push notifications? Bonjour?

Should I do a peer-peer or a client-server model? If I need to create a server, what would be the steps required to do that?

Could someone point me out to a good and recent (SDK 3 or 4) tutorial and/or the juicy parts of the documentation? I see a ton of networking documentation and I'm not really sure which parts I need to read.

A general plan of attack would be met with great glee(the more detailed, the more I will hug you)!

Thanks!

I would do the following:

1) Create a secure webservice to handle message passing in .net.

2) Add in a Push notifications to let users know when they have new messages.

3) ...

4) Profit!

You can use NSURLConnection to send requests to your webservice and then parse the result string.

[pufftissue]

So I just heard about XMPP (Jabber), and would it be easier to just use that or build a messaging app from scratch? Do people typically build a networked app from scratch given the existence of XMPP? I am reading the Apple CFNetwork docs and wow, it is extremely daunting to me.

How would I also add an online "buddy" list? I'm at a loss as to how to implement that part.