I’ve been wracking my brain doing research the past several weeks on what the best options will be for me moving forward… I have settled on using PHP for the on-demand portions of the backend. This will offer the most flexibility due to the ubiquitousness of the LAMP stack and the large amount of developer support available for the platform.

I’m still trying to decide which language to use for the service portion of the backend. Simply from the writing-a-daemon perspective, C would be the logical choice. However, a good secure Telnet client library and a good MySQL implementation are already important (yes, I know I could write my own, but I’m a firm believer in not repeating the work somebody else has done unless I can improve on it). Everything else can be tacked on as needed, but at this point the service portion of the backend consists pretty much of something to read the telnet feed, something to get the info into the database, and something to send the push notifications. I am thinking about using GNUStep to kind of keep things on the same wavelength .