Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Looks like nice beach weather! If you're getting the feeling that I'm not a big fan of
SOAP, you wouldn't be wrong. And, mind you, what we just saw is an extremely simple
SOAP call, with no authentication and very simple request and response objects. I have
not tried to make WSDL2ObjC work with WS-Security, although there is anecdotal
evidence that it is possible. In any event, the good news is that SOAP on iOS isn't
impossible.
A Final Caution
Whenever you are relying on third-party libraries, you're at the mercy of the maintain-
ers. If it is a proprietary library, you have to hope that they will keep the tool up to date,
and that it will not be broken by the next update to XCode or iOS.
For open source libraries, things are a little better. If the committers on the project
aren't willing or able to update the project, you have the source and can take a swing
at it yourself. Depending on the license, this may mean that you have to make the
sources to your changes available for download.
This is not some abstract warning, I know for a fact that most of the tools mentioned
in the chapter do not work in projects that are using the Automatic Reference Count
compiler feature in iOS 5. This means that you're going to be faced with the choice of
trying to get the libraries working with ARC, or building them as non-ARC static li-
braries that are called from your ARC project. One factor to consider when choosing
libraries is how active the developer community is, and how often new versions come
out. WSDL2ObjC, for example, seems relatively moribund, and might slip into orphan
status in the future.
With our application cheerfully (if uselessly) talking to web services, we should think
about how we're going to test it. That's what you'll learn in
Chapter 5
.
