Website data to iOS and Android?

[pctechtv]

I am looking for a helpful start (key words or even phrases) to begin understanding what it takes for a web site to give auto notification to an app on iOS and Android. I hope that wording is understandable, but in short how can things that happen on my website be automated to send the data as information to phones apps. Is this handled via web services? The way I was imagining it was like a site that a user (contributor) interacts with to let you know some feedback from another contributor is needed. The user (contributor) would then interact with the site and a phone application would instantly notify the other contributor. I was thinking this could be instant (as fast as servers can work). Simply from something like a click. Thanks

[Steve Sommers]

You're asking a simple question with a very complex answer. To start, you will need an app (at least 2 if you want android and apple) because there is no way to notify a web site user using a browser unless the user is currently on your site at the time. Technically your site would not directly push notifications to your app users; instead it's an indirect push where your app periodically polls your site via web services for "pushed" notifications. While I'm very versed on the CF web service and web site development, I'm fairly new to the mobile app development and do not have a good recommendation for you. There are a couple tutorials on CF mobile development with CF11, but for me the tutorial got lost in the setup of the dev environment (something like a 1 hour tutorial after a 4-8 hour setup).

Personal Warning: For me, the biggest disadvantage of CF mobile is that I'm a BIG fan of MVC and I have not found a way to accomplish this with using CFCLIENT. Also I like keeping server side code server side and client site code client side and CFCLIENT seems to blur this delineation.