I'm planning an application that has a mobile app as a front end (and perhaps a web front end also that performs a different purpose). Something like Runkeeper, or Runtastic, if you're familiar with those apps. The mobile device is the primary method of user interaction, and the web site has stats and dashboards that the users can view afterwards.
I would like the main application to reside in Windows Azure. I'm confused about how to architect the application though - should the business logic reside in a web role, or a worker role? If the main user interface is a mobile app, does it connect to the worker role to persist or retrieve data, or to a web role, or neither? I understand a typical scenario where a web role provides a user interface which can persist data directly to storage or pass data to queues or tables to be picked up by worker roles, but the presence of the mobile app throws me off.
Any help? Thanks!
For hosting a server component for mobile apps to connect to, I think the simplest thing that would work would be a web role hosting an ASP.NET web application. Web applications can be used for services as well as web front end (HTML) web sites.
ASP.NET MVC and Web API make setting up web services really easy, and it's easy to work with non-HTML data formats, such as JSON or XML. Your mobile app could communicate with the web app using a REST JSON API, or you could use XML/SOAP if you wanted to, or whatever format you want. REST APIs with JSON as the transfer format is probably the most popular at the moment. One way to think about a web app is that it's just a way to send and recieve data from clients. If the client is a web browser, you can serve up your content as HTML pages, or if your client is a mobile app, you can serve up your data as JSON and let the client display it however it needs to. Basically, your web app can be both your web site (HTML), and your "API" for non-web-browser clients.
You can think of worker roles sort of like Windows Services. They are primarily used for doing back-end processing, and things like that. A worker role might provide some capability to host a public facing API, but you would have to manage connections, message pipelines, recycling, and all that yourself; whereas, a web role would have a web server (IIS) provided for you to manage connections, etc. If you are going to introduce things like message queues, it would make sense to have the public facing API be a web role, and the message processing component a worker role. The web app could receive the message from the client via a REST JSON API, and then pass the message off to a queue, where the worker role picks it up. Introducing queues and worker roles makes sense if you have heavy-duty server-side business logic that can be processed in the background without impacting the client.