I have some experience regarding IPhone and Android development but I am now struggling to solve a new class of problem: apps that involve a client/server chatroom feature. That is, an app when people can exchange text over the internet, and without having the app to constantly “pull” content from the server.

So that problem can’t be solved with a normal php/mysql website, there must be some kind of application running on a server that is able to send message from the server to the phone, rather than having the phone to check for new messages every 10 seconds…

So I’m looking for ways to solve the different problems here:

• What framework should I use on the two sides (phone / server)? It should be some kind of library that doesn’t prevent me to write paid apps. It should also be possible to have the same server for the Iphone and android version of the app.
• What server / hosting solution do I need with what sort of features, I just have no experience regarding server application that can handle and initiate multiple connections and are hosted on hardware that is always online

I tried to find resources online but couldn’t so far, either the libraries had the wrong kind of license/language or I just didn’t understand… Sometimes there were nice tutorial but for different needs such as peer2peer chat over local network… Same with the server and the hosting problem, not sure where to start really, I’m calling for help and I promise I will complete this page with notes about the experience I will get :-)

Obviously the ideal would be to find a tutorial I missed that include client code, server code and a free scalable server… That being said, If I see something as good, it probably means that I have eaten the wrong kind of mushroom again… So, failing that, any pointer which might help me toward that quest, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Mikael