Data serialization

Question

Dear folks, I've got an objective-c/cocoa based application that I'm working on. This app is client<->server. Currently, the communcation protocol is based upon some fairly simple XML. While XML works for this task, it is not ideal in any aspect. It's a pain to serialize data to XML, it's not particularly light-weight, and difficult to incorporate non-data information (such as: 'do this next') in.

I'm looking for suggestions to an alternative.

I've considered some of the ones listed here, but haven't decided on any. Suggestions?

Answer 1

I'm using JSON for an iphone application - I typically would prefer XML, but we needed it very lightweight, so we decided on JSON.

If your working with XML, you should take a look at XPath if you've not already - it will give you tremendous power for extracting values from a XML data structure.

Answer 2

What kind of server do you have? If the server is java based I'd recommend looking at HessianKit by Fredrik Olsson. Encode/Decode to ordinary Objective-C types and put in NSArrays and NSDictionaries will make the experience smoother.

Answer 3

What's wrong with (Portable) Distributed Objects?

Answer 4

If you are talking to a Objective-C server you can look into encoding and decoding with the preferred serialization methods available in Objective-C.

NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver

Basically you will get an NSData from the NSKeyedArchiver that you will send (bytes/length) to the other part and there place it back into an NSData and use NSKeyedUnarchiver to unpack it into objects again.