Soulstorm

Hello,

I have a project in mind, and what I intend to do is this:

There's a server which holds some kinds of paid subscriptions (paid by a website to which I haven't got access to.). Their database is in mySQL, and I will have access to that database.

I want to connect the iPhone to an intermediate server (between the iPhone and the "subscriptions" server) which will consult the subscription server about the subscription of the user, and will send data to the phone accordingly.

Provided that I already have one part of the problem solved (which is the iPhone accepting http connections and raw data streams from servers from the internet), and provided that I haven't got the option to do it another way , I would like to ask about setting up the server in general (not that the intermediate server that I will be involved with will run Windows Server 2008). Consider the hardware already purchased, and the necessary bandwidth available as well.

Specifically, these are my problems:
1) What technologies are better for me to use? (I know C/C++/ObjC, PHP, mySQL, HTML with CSS and some C# with .NET). SHould I be looking into ASP.NET?
2) How do I setup the server to respond to specific received messages? Is there any technology I should be looking into, or any commercial or non-commercial product?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

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Project::Soulstorm (personal homepage)