I know this is kind of a broad question, but I'm new to servers. I've searched for weeks for some kind of how-to or tutorial all over the internet and even at book stores, and I still can't seem to find a good article or book that shows and explains how to make a web server, so I can push information to an iOS app that I'm working on. Does anyone know of any good books or tutorials that I can go through to get the basics of web servers for use in iOS apps? I've purchased Mac OS X Lion Server and got the web server working with my website, but I can't seem to figure out how to add a username and password to this--let alone push information from the server into the app.
If anyone has any experience using Lion Server with an iOS app, I would love to hear your two cents.
This is a very common problem but it is hard to find a good answer. My personal suggestion is it use Parse. This allows you to focus on the app development and virtually ignore the server side stuff. It also handles threading, so you can avoid that topic until you are more comfortable with development.
If you are hell bent on building your own server, take a look at this for ideas on how to get started with a RESTful service using Rails. This shows you how to make JSON and xml requests from a server.