Communicating with a server, is XML the preferred method?

If a iphone app needs to communicate with a server, is xml the best route in most cases?

how hard开发者_开发知识库 is it to parse xml in obj-c?

It really depends on the type of data you wish to exchange, but XML will at the very least be able to handle any complexity of data structure you require. (If you only want to exchange a minimal amount of information, you might want to consider JSON that said.)

There are quite a few XML parsers available for Objective-C, most of which are discussed on this existing question: Navigating XML from Objective-C

Finally, there's a great blog post on Ray Wenderlich's web site that discusses the various XML parsers with a view to speed/memory footprint which might be important if you're parsing a large amount of data.

Depends on what is beeing transmitted.

That said I use JSON for 90% of my server to app communication. Easy to parse as libraries are readily available.

Nope. Not hard. But when it comes to APIs it seems many prefer JSON.

JSON is easier to work with than XML, regardless of parser used. Lots of server side people will understand JSON quite well because of the need to use it to work with Javascript.

The iPhone JSON parser I'd look at using first is YAJL.

I would either go with XML or JSON ( http://www.json.org/ ).

It's very easy to parse XML on the iPhone. There are quite a few XML parsers out there based on your preference. For a DOM parser you can use TBXML, otherwise Apple's built-in NSXMLParser does the job.

I use JSON, which is a great (and popular) solution for your server as well. Try out SBJSON for a good obj c library:

http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/