Question

The most common way to consume SOAP based services on Android seems to be via kSOAP2 since it’s recommended here on stackoverflow very often. I’m a fan of SOAP since I’ve been working with JAX-WS for a while.

But even the people behind kSOAP2 do not recommend it for mobile devices. I know that SOAP produces a lot of overhead you don’t want to have on your mobile device. Do you have any experience with SOAP based services consumed by Android, is it really an issue? What is the main bottleneck, bandwidth or memory/cpu?

I need to transmit text and binary data, is REST the best alternative here?

Thanks

edit: If possible I want to avoid to build a parser by myself, should work without own parser. Maybe GSON?

Answer 1

I need to transmit text and binary data, is REST the best alternative
here?

yes. you can send binary data via HTTP POST, and sending text is trivial with REST. I suggest you to use JSON format as it is light weight and highly accepted through developers so you can find a lot of examples.

see http://www.springsource.org/spring-android for library for Android to automates JSON to object and vice versa generations.