Is it correct, that there is no official API by Apple to create a well formed XML?
I searched the web for a while but I just found some external frameworks to create XML data structures.
I need it for a web service call and would prefer a native API by Apple.
Of course I could just put together some Strings, but I think that's not the best way to do.
There's libxml2, which is supported API on the iPhone. Nothing higher-level, but there are plenty of third-party wrappers.
Related
I see KissXML and Googles GData are both deprecated.
Can/should we still use them ?
What are the alternatives?
I want to be able to read and write xml with an XSD schema on iOS.
Any suggestions?
The gdata-objectivec-client project is not deprecated, though Google is generally using JSON for newer APIs.
The library's support for XML is wrapped up essentially in one class file, GDataXMLNode, which simulates Apple's tree-style NSXML API and builds on libxml2. While GDataXML is tailored to the needs of the library, it's usable outside of the library as well.
For your own app, it does not really matter if any particular XML library continues to be supported, so long as the library suits the needs of your app, and you have the source code to do any necessary maintenance.
I don't know if Google's GData is deprecated. As long as it parse XML correctly, I don't see why you can't/shouldn't use it. I'm using it.
Is there a general Cocoa or Cocoa Touch library for interacting with any web service API, or one which can be used as a basis for creating my own library for a web service? For example, I could add some details about how to interact with the Vimeo API (how to verify user details, what URLs to call). I'm not sure how this would work in reality.
If not, can anyone suggest an web service library which I could alter to change the API calls? It would need to be fairly simple (a small API) and easy to adapt. An example is this Cocoa library for Twitter (although it would probably be too complicated to adapt). Would it be easier just to code it up from scratch?
I don't think there is a library that will automagically work with any web API. In fact I don't even think it's possible to write such a library, since you can define your web API any way you want to. That library would have to be pretty smart in order to figure out how to use an arbitrary API.
I think the closest you'll get is something like ASIHTTPRequest, which is a great library for interacting with web services. If you add a JSON and/or XML parser you'll have everything you need to interact with almost any web API.
Found another library for interacting with RESTful web services. It's called RestKit. From their description:
RestKit is a Cocoa framework for interacting with RESTful web services in Objective C on iOS and Mac OS X. It provides a set of primitives for interacting with web services wrapping GET, POST, PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs behind a clean, simple interface. RestKit also provides a system for modeling remote resources by mapping them from JSON (or XML) payloads back into local domain objects. Object mapping functions with normal NSObject derived classes with properties. There is also an object mapping implementation included that provides a Core Data backed store for persisting objects loaded from the web.
i want to read and write data to a website (server on web) and don't have any information about webservices and other things that related to it
Does anybody have any idea about how to start it (mean offer complete books,papers,tutorials,websites,… or what should i learn at first mean is it necessary to learn xml,soap,... and other things)
Thank you
I've used Google App Engine with great success. You would format your data to output as JSON and use an iPhone library to read it. I've used this one (though Touch JSON seems to be more popular).
Read about REST, ROA and AtomPub. Thats got me started. I'm about to implement some webservices in WCF (WCF now acts like a RESTFul webservice, but you can also use plain old SOAP). Before I got to WCF, I experimented with RoR. RoR uses REST "out-of-the-box".
I would like to build an XML over HTTP provisioning interface using Zend Framework. Should Zend_XmlRpc_Server be used for this purpose? If so, can you recommend any guides on using it? (Specifically the part retrieving incoming XML and parsing it.)
What kind of service is it? - will you send binary data or rather short texts? Will all clients be in PHP mostly or you are foreseeing a wide range of clients?
Usually if you're doing a web-based small service, REST will do the trick, it's easy to develop and consume, even by plain JS frontends, such as jQuery.
If it's something more complex, you can't go wrong with SOAP, though it's a bit complex in developing. Make sure you arm yourself with SoapUI
XmlRPC has some limitations, especially sending binary data. There's some thorough comparison to have a look at this blog
We have an iPhone application created by an external consultancy that we're planning to add card payment facilities to in a subsequent release.
We plan to host a service ourselves in order to process the payment stuff, with SSL encryption. We have in-house expertese for all of this apart from the (contracted out) iPhone bit.
Are there any specific gotchas that we should be aware of that concern designing web services for iPhones?
We'll be writing the web service in C# 3.5.
JSON data format is better to be converted into NSArray or NSDictionary objects. It's easier and faster to be parsed.
So, specifically for the iPhone, it's a lot better to consume JSON data. Unless if there's some technical complexity that JSON is unable to handle.
Check YAJL:
http://github.com/lloyd/yajl
There are Objective-C wrapper/implementations by gabriel in github and by MGTwitterEngine.
TouchJSON is another code that's simpler than yajl. You can convert JSON string into NSDictionary or NSArray object in 2 lines of code. But, it maybe slower.
I'm not sure there are really any special considerations. The iPhone should be able to communicate with most types of webservice.
I worked on an iPhone app that communicated to a RESTful webservice written in Java.
I imagine it's pretty straightforward across the board - there are plenty of libraries for parsing/generating XML or JSON formatted messages, the iPhone can handle HTTP authentication, HTTPS, caching, etc.
It's just down to your iPhone developer to get it right :)
For SOAP based web services I strongly suggest that you try gSOAP. This library does not support Objective-C, however it supports C and C++ and is certainly the most complete open source project to access SOAP based web service; it also outperforms all of the other libraries.
For Objective-C you may want to try wsdl2objc, but I am not sure if it provides support for SSL/TLS (gSOAP does).
Finally, REST based web services are easily handled using ASIHTTPRequest.