title: Strategies for Synchronizing Data Between a Rails App and iPhone App
body: <p>I've written many iPhone Applications that have pulled data from web services and I've worked on synchronizing data between an iPhone App and a Web Application, but I've always felt that there is probably a better way to handle the synchronization.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to know what strategies you have used to synchronize data between your iPhone(read: mobile) Apps and your Rails(read: web) Applications.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Are there any strategies that scale particularly well?</li>
  <li>How have you dealt with large amounts of data? (Do you use paged responses?)</li>
  <li>How do you make sure that data is not overwritten?</li>
  <li>Is there a reason to avoid Ruby on Rails?
  
  <ul>
  <li>if so, can you suggest an alternative? What is better about the alternative?</li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>What strategies have failed?
  
  <ul>
  <li>Why do you believe that those strategies failed?</li>
  </ul></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I would like to be able to keep all of the data modifications on the server, but the particular application I am about to start work on will need the ability to operate while disconnected from the network.</p>
  
  <p>The user will be able to update data on the mobile device and update data through the web application.</p>
  
  <p>When the user's mobile device connects to the server any local changes will be pushed to the server.</p>