Wcf on iPhone?

@YaronNaveh

Apple's announcement yesterday on relaxing the strict AppStore SDK policy is good news for web services interoperability. Why is that? We need to get some background first:

With the rising popularity of iPhone development, people seek for web services support.

One known Mac framework is wsdl2objc (wsdl to objective-C, the iPhone development language). It give the basic functionality of creating a proxy and calling the service.

If your web service is relatively simple and you can afford to build the soap payload by hand, you could also consider using the native Http library CFNetwork or a the ASIHTTPRequest wrapper.

The latter option also enables transport level security (ssl).

Message level security
This is a known pain point. I have yet to find a WS-Security implementation for the iPhone. If you are doing simple stuff (mainly username token) you can get away with manually pushing these headers. But more advanced scenarios (involving X.509) are harder and Apple does not seem to develop a ws-security implementation soon.

So why doesn't any third party develop one?
Until yesterday, apple banned the usage of code generators for AppStore applications. While a soap stack may be developed in pure objective-C, the realm of web services highly relies upon code generation and libraries.
Yesterday, Apple announced that it now allows any development tools to be used for AppStore applications. While the media mainly mentioned the implication on Adobe Flash, the announcment also positively affected the MonoTouch framework which enables C# development for iPhone. And while MonoTouch WCF support is still experiential and does not include advanced WS-*, there is now hope to have all the advanced stuff in a future version.

UPDATE 1: It seems MonoTouch does support the Wcf Silverlight stack. I assume username token is in but not sure about binary encoding and tcp transport. Looking at Mono WCF support page shows that Wcf is still not fully supported there, which may be an indication.

UPDATE 2: Carlos mentions that Silverlight is supported on Mac. After yesterday's announcement there is a reason to believe that SL will be officially supported in iPhone either which makes standalone SL applications a prospect too.

@YaronNaveh

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