Frank's Ramblings - 4 Newbie Apple Push Notification Server/Service (APNS) Questions

This where I jot down some of the most random shit that pops in my head. I post to it as often as I like without regard to how annoying it might be. The contents are then queued up and posted to twitter every 6 hours or so.

4 Newbie Apple Push Notification Server/Service (APNS) Questions

1. I’m thinking of using the software available at easyapns.com as the start for my push server. What other recommendations are out there? Has anyone used Erica Sadun’s perl script examples in production?

2. http://easyapns.com simply takes care of pushing notifications it finds in a MySQL table. Does anyone have any sample code or tutorials for accepting some sort of data from an iPhone app (JSON maybe) and dropping it in the table being looked at by easyapns?

3. I have an Apple Dev Id but haven’t yet paid the $99 for the iPhone Dev Program. Is there a way to test push notifications before signing up for this program and paying the fee? It appears I have to generate the appropriate provisioning certificates to test with any of Apple’s servers. Is there a way to run my push server locally and “fake out” the Apple server side while testing my app?

4. And finally, does anyone have recommendations on a web hosting provider for use with APNS? My web host doesn’t support cron jobs so I have to switch and it occurred to me that folks might have experience with the reliability of using cron on some hosting providers. Of course I’m looking for the cheapest and best performing option possible :)