[iPhone SDK] WebService Options

Question

So anyone reading this, probably has seen the numerous other topics about how the iPhone and SOAP simply is on the complexity level that makes it almost not worth the effort.
Multiple places have recommended: RESTful Web Services
As an alternative method for doing it.
Given I have spent the last multiple years using SOAP driven webservices... going a new path is well.. "interesting"
Does anyone out there have a very basic iPhone code segment, that will show the usage of a RESTful Web Service.
Our long term needs, we have multiple web-service all of which are parameter driven.. With the combination of limited XML functions on the iPhone, we need to do some heavy lifting on the server end... basically putting RESTFul services around our existing SOAP ones.
So any basic examples on using parameter based calls, via RESTful web-service method... would be very much appreciated.
Also... anyone that any other alternatives to this issue... it would also be appreciated as at this point, we are identifying what needs to be done... in order to get all our pieces working, without starting over from scratch.

Answer 1

The appended code adds a record to a Ruby on Rails-based website by treating it as a RESTful web service. (Recent versions of Rails include this capability natively; in this case, I'm exploiting the fact that if you POST an XML data structure corresponding to the structure of a model to a Rails resource, it will create a new resource of the appropriate type.) I've lightly edited it to obscure a few details, but not in any way that will affect you.
The code registers the user's locale with my site so I have some idea of my user base's demographics. I don't check for success or save the result body (which is the return value of sendSynchronousRequest:returningResponse:error:), since my users don't actually care if this process was successful. If you need to include such checks in your app, or want to use the result body, read the URL Loading System article in your documentation.
Keep in mind, though, that there are several approaches to REST. You could send XML back and forth, or you could use the application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data formats used by HTML forms. If the other end of the connection is Mac OS X Server, you could even send NSCoder-serialized objects or XML property lists back and forth! Just use whatever you find easiest with the tools you have available and the requirements you need to meet.
What makes it REST is:
1. I'm specifying what I want to operate on (the set of all registrations) with a URL.
2. I'm specifying the operation I want to perform (adding a record) with the HTTP method. (If I wanted to delete the registration later, I could do it by using the HTTP DELETE method on /registrations/434.xml, or whatever its URL ended up being. Actually, I've forbidden that action except by administrators, but that's beside the point.)
- (NSString*)locale { (code omitted due to irrelevance) }
- (NSString*)xml {
return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><registration><locale>%@</locale></registration>",
[self locale]];
- (void)sendRegistration {
// This method is invoked as a background thread, so it doesn't
NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSURL * url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://mycompany.com/registrations.xml"];
NSMutableURLRequest * request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
[request setValue:@"application/xml" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
[request setHTTPBody:[[self xml] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
NSURLResponse * response;
NSError * error;
[NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];
// We're ignoring all the outputs because we don't really care.
[pool release];