I have very little server side experience. I am wondering what my best option would be for the following situation. There is an API I want to get data from, but there is a limit to how many times I access that data per second, something like less than 10 requests per minute or so, before it gets frozen. What can I use as a server to schedule a request to the API for all the information I need, every hour or so, so that I can then access the data from my server as many times as I want to from my mobile app?
Are there tools out there that I can take advantage of?
Good question, I recently had to learn a bit on the server side for the push notifications i'm trying to implement in a market data (fx) app i'm writing.
The best solution i've found is:
Assuming you're on a Mac,
Get MAMP here - it's PHP, MySQL and Apache webserver.
You can write PHP code to pull the data from the API, store it on your MySQL database you set up with MAMP.
You can then write a little objective C code, to hit up your Apache webserver on another PHP file that pulls the data you stored earlier.
That's basically it, now I know what you're thinking, you probably don't know any PHP. Either did I until last weekend and you should see what I'm able to do in it now!
I only knew objective C, but even so learning PHP was very easy - and i'm not the best coder out there.
I have a PHP script that (within about 10 lines of code) goes to a website's API pulls JSON values for FX prices and stores them in my DB. I can then hit up my Webserver and pull the values.
Learning all of this has made me realise that Web applications are incredibly powerful, where before I never considered them when developing iOS apps.