Best way to use XML-RPC in Cocoa application?

Question

Hi,

I wanted to write a GUI-wrapper for an application which uses XML-RPC and wondered if there are any XML-RPC frameworks available for Cocoa and if so what's the best?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I believe there is a web services framework present since very early versions of MacOS X. I heard about it on Late Night Cocoa podcast #3, which is about SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST for Cocoa. I have never personally used that framework.

Answer 2

The framework Denton alludes to is Apple's Web Services Core which claims to support XML-RPC and SOAP. I've personally tried to use it for SOAP and found the support incredibly lacking (to the point that I ended up rolling my own via CFHTTPRequest and libxml2). Various mailing lists lead me to believe that it might work a bit better for XML-RPC.

Note that this API was first included in 10.2 (Jaguar) and I'm pretty sure it hasn't been touched since then. The documentation also contains numerous omissions and errors that have never been corrected. And it's a Carbon API, so you won't get all of the fun Objective-C goodness that we've all come to know and love.

That being said, it's provided by the OS so you don't have to worry about shipping and linking against third party libraries. So it's not a bad place to start.

Answer 3

Thank you very much for your answers.

Yesterday I did an extensive Google session on this topic and came up with some dedicated XML-RPC frameworks for Cocoa.

1. "The Cocoa XML-RPC Framework" from Eric Czarny which can be found at http://github.com/eczarny/xmlrpc/tree/master
2. "Open Source XML-RPC Class for Cocoa" from Brent Simmons can be found at http://ranchero.com/cocoa/xmlrpc/
3. "XMLRPC Framework" from Marcus Müller which seems a little bit outdated and can be found at http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/software/XMLRPC/

I wonder if anyone has any experience with any of those or a recommendation which one to use.

Answer 4

I think that the best available and actively maintained framework is Eric Czarny’s “Cocoa XML-RPC Framework”. In the end there is no magic behind XML-RPC and you should be also fairly happy with Apple’s Web Services Core (like James already mentioned). If you want to get rid of the C-style syntax I really recommend Eric’s framework, because it isn’t so verbose and relatively nice to work with.