We have an iPhone application created by an external consultancy that we’re planning to add card payment facilities to in a subsequent release.
We plan to host a service ourselves in order to process the payment stuff, with SSL encryption. We have in-house expertese for all of this apart from the (contracted out) iPhone bit.
Are there any specific gotchas that we should be aware of that concern designing web services for iPhones?
We’ll be writing the web service in C# 3.5.
JSON data format is better to be converted into NSArray or NSDictionary objects. It’s easier and faster to be parsed.
So, specifically for the iPhone, it’s a lot better to consume JSON data. Unless if there’s some technical complexity that JSON is unable to handle.
Check YAJL:
http://github.com/lloyd/yajl
There are Objective-C wrapper/implementations by gabriel in github and by MGTwitterEngine.
TouchJSON is another code that’s simpler than yajl. You can convert JSON string into NSDictionary or NSArray object in 2 lines of code. But, it maybe slower.