iphone - Push notification guide?

Question

i need a rundown on how to fully utilise the push notification system. Iv read the push notification guide on the apple website but still unclear of some things.

Lets say i have a windows PC and an iPad. 1) what should the PC be configured with to become a "provider"? Should it be configured to be like a server, giving out data upon requests. 2) How does the provider send the token to the APNs?

The reason for using the push notification system is so that i can invoke a (tablereload data) method so that it would update the table as it has some custom images added as its subview so it would change images if some conditions in the server side were met.

Thanks for reading guys , hoping for any kind of feedback or help.

Cheers, Ephist

Answer 1

For anything other than development and testing, you'll generally want to run the provider on a server infrastructure that's not hosted on a home Windows machine.

You can either use a commercial provider like iLime or Urban Airship, but there's also a few tutorials and open source solutions out there:

• EasyAPNS (Push notifications using PHP & MySQL)
• How to build an Apple Push Notification provider server (tutorial)
• PHP Apple Push Notification Server
• Programming Apple Push Notification Services (contains details on certificate configuration)

There's also a local test app for Mac OS called PushMeBaby that you can use for development purposes.