Re: General question about GNUStep

[Michael Thaler]

Hi,

> In my experience, the simplest (one-liner!) and robustest solution was
> indeed to send plist-serialised data over the wire -- both platforms
> (GNUstep and OSX) support fast serialization/deserialisation to plist,
> and as an added benefit this is easier to debug as the data is sent in
> clear, and in a notably more efficient way than XML do :)
> you can find some infos on the architecture I used in
> http://xdev.org/thesis/phd-thesis-nicolas-roard.pdf
>
> Note that writing a plist reader in java or C++ is quite simple.
> Another possibility is to use XML-RPC, which has implementation
> everywhere. But this is quite verbose (even if it's far from the
> abomination that SOAP is).

You also might consider using Google Protocol Buffers: 
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Protocol Buffers defines an efficient format for exchanging data over a 
network. 
The great thing about Protocol Buffers is that you can add or remove fields 
without breaking the protocol.

You define the messages in an IDL like syntax:

message Person {
  required int32 id = 1;
  required string name = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

There is also an Objective C implementation:
http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/wiki/ProtocolBuffers

I don't know if it works with Gnustep though.

Greetings,
Michael