I'm going to use gSOAP to interact with a WCF webservice in my Mac project. It does pretty much exactly what I need and it does it well (pretty much the exact opposite of WSMakeStubs;)). The only downside is that it's C/C++ only, meaning I either need to convert all my types into C types on the fly or write a complete wrappering solution to do it for me.
I'd rather not reinvent the wheel here, and I'm obviously not the only one who has wanted to do this, but so far I haven't been able to find anybody who has actually posted any code to this effect.
Does anybody know of any code available that would save me from having to write the whole thing myself?
(It doesn't quite answer your question, but) I've used the techniques used in Cocoa SOAP Client (open source) to connect to a server and send/receive SOAP requests. It works really well, unless you are connecting to a server with a self-signed SSL certificate.
(This basically translates XML structures into native Cocoa structures, and back the other way on sending).
We use gSOAP at work, and it does the job, but makes lots of generated code, and limits you to working in particular ways with the data.
I'm working on a wrapper generator (or possibly modifications to gSOAP itself to contribute back); I'm not done and won't be for a little while.
Note: I'm one of the folks you linked to.
I'd say the current answer is "No".
I ended up creating an Objective-C wrapper mostly by hand for my web service (including category methods for NSArray to translate an NSArray of X into a soap array of X and vica versa, etc) since it was a one-off and I did not expect it to change particularly often. I'm happy with it, but I do need to modify it by hand whenever a signature is changed or a method is added.
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Alright. I know this may draw some heat as "not good question"/etc., but I haven't found anywhere describing the process in particular (all the resources I've found describe the client-side requesting, not the server-side responses).
I'm going to be working on writing an iOS app in the next coming months necessitating the use of a web server. There are many resources on how to set these up, get them a static IP, etc. but I haven't found any clear ones (and by clear, I mean intelligible by someone not already experienced in it) on how to write a program for such a server that actually responds to the HTTP or client request.
Suppose I have a dummy app and web server combo where the app posts an HTTP request for the time. How would I write an app for the server to bounce the time back when the request comes in? Ideally, I'd like to write this in Objective-C as it's the language I've had the most experience in (whether forced or by choice).
Again, I apologize if it isn't a good question or very clear - I just haven't found any resources that are able to give me much of a place to start.
Your question could probably be described as 'too broad', but I will give it a shot anyway. Disclaimer: I haven't written much server-side code but I have been programming in objc for years now.
The reason you haven't found (m)any resources to help you do what you want to do is because Objective-C is rarely used for writing server-side code. Exactly why that is the case is no doubt a long story, but essentially the answer is because many of the dominant technologies out there (PHP, Python, C#, Java, to name only the prevailing languages) have feaures and associated frameworks that are better suited for that purpose.
In other words, although I can doubltless be done, you are probably better off using something other than Objective-C for the task because:
You will have many more resources available to help you get your job done.
You will have a much larger community that you can query for assistance when (not if) you encounter an obstacle.
You will not have to do many things the hard way because there will be existing tools to make it easier.
I would also recommend you to use PHP as the server-side programming language.
Some mounths ago I was in the same situation as you. We have planned to write a app (Android) which loads some data from a webserver. I've never programmed server-side code till the beginning of the project. So it was quiet interessting and new for me.
We have choosen PHP as the server-side language.
All I can say is, that it was really easy to learn and write your first scripts to get a response to a HTTP-Request. Also the usage of MySQL as the database is really easy and it works fine with PHP.
PHP is a standard. You can find a huge amount of documentation and examples. And of course tutorials and good books ... ;)
I am trying to encrypt an NSString to both NSString and NSData in Objective-C and so I began a search.
I started off here, but that went way over my head, unfortunately.
I then found myself at this post and it came across to be very easy to follow, so I went along and tried to figure out the implementation. After looking over the implementation, I saw the second answer in the post and saw he had more adaptable implementations, which brought me to his gist. As per the gist readme, he "took down this Gist due to concerns about the security of the encryption/decryption". That leads me to believe that the security of the implementation from above has security flaws as well.
From that gist, however, he mentioned another alternative that I could use for encryption. After taking a look at the code, I noticed that it generates NSData with "a header, encryption salt, HMAC salt, IV, ciphertext, and HMAC". I know how to handle that to decode using the same library again, but how would I pass this off to a server guy, given that I don't quite know what I'm sending to him?
At the root of it all, I'm in over my head. Given what I said above and knowing that I don't have the time to take on a lot of learning for this, unless if it is absolutely necessary, how should I best handle going about this encoding/decoding process, given a private key with the end goal of shipping it off to a server that is not designed by me? (How's that for a run on sentence!)
Maybe you should ask the server guy? When ever you have encryption between too parties you have to have some kind of agreement on the format of that data, the raw primitives don't handle that alone, not to mention it's easy to mess things up security wise dealing with just the primitives and the desire to just send the aes ciphertext alone is going to cause mistakes.
RNCryptor, which you mention, is a high level encryption library it defines a simple format that others would have to conform too, it's simple thus helps going cross platform, but it has that extra that you need to do AES properly. There are other libraries like that too (NaCL, GPGME, and Keyczar), that are not as simple in format, but simple in usage, so you'd need to be able to use the library on both ends, but I'd highly recommend that you uses something like that, if you can, rather than rolling your own.
Keyczar specifically exists for java, python, c++, c# and go, so if you can use the c++ version on the iOS (or Mac, which ever you are targeting on the client) you might be good on the server as there are several choices.
I have developed an app for iPhone which communicates with a web server though XML based communication model.
In one of my source files, NetworkLayer, I created XML objects and send them to the web server. I have also declared all constants used in my app and also URLs (used to access my web server) in MyApp_Prefix.pch.
I want to ask if there is any way that some hacker can get access to my source code of generating XML objects or MyApp_Prefix.pch file if he has .app file of my app? Can anyone please help me in this regard?
No, he can't get your source code. But he can look at the HTTP requests and responses to see what XML you have created and what the server has sent back. Does that matter?
A hacker could reverse-engineer your code with some effort by looking at what your code tells the device to do. With some effort and knowledge of assembly and reverse engineering, one can see much of what your code contains. This does however require some serious effort and lots of time, so for most apps, it is unlikely that anyone would attempt to do so.
A much easier way would be to intercept the data on it's way to or from the server, and unless you are obfuscating the data, encrypting it or using SSL, you can't prevent this.
If you are worried about protecting your data, you should try some simple obfuscation. There are many ways to do this, the most popular one being XOR:ing your data with a key both the client and the server knows. Applying the key will flip the bits in your data and quickly and easily turn it into unreadable gibberish. Applying the same key again will flip the same bits again and you have perfectly readable XML.
It should be noted that XOR Encryption is quite possible and relatively easy to crack, especially since the key has to be stored as a part of the application, but it requires lots of time and effort to break through and doesn't qualify as encryption legally (eg. you shouldn't need to go through the whole Encryption Export thing when releasing the app), while still keeping the data gibberish-y enough to throw off most people - which is usually enough, unless your data is really sensitive, eg. if you're transferring payment credentials or similar.
I have a game I wrote in Actionscript 3 I'm looking to port to iOS. The game has about 9k LOC spread across 150 classes, most of the classes are for data models, state handling and level generation all of which should be easy to port.
However, the thought of rejiggering the syntax by hand across all these files is none too appealing. Are there tools that can help me speed up this process?
I'm not looking for a magical tool here, nor am I looking for a cross compiler, I just want some help converting my source files.
I don't know of a tool, but this is the way I'd try and attack your problem if there really is a lot of (simple) code to convert. I'm sure my suggestion is not that useful on parts of the code that are very flash-specific (all the DisplayObject stuff?) and also not that useful on lots of your logic. But it would be fun to build! :-)
Partial automatic conversion should be possible, especially if the objects are just 'data containers', watch out for bringing too much as3-idiom over to objective-c though, it might not always be a good fit.
Unless you want to create your own (semi) parser for as3 you'd need some sort of a parser, apparently FlexPMD has one (never used it), and there probably are others.
After getting your hands on a parser you have to find some way of suggesting to the system what parts could be converted automatically. You could try and add rules to the parser/generator script for the general case. For more specific cases I'd use custom metadata on the actual class/property/method, assuming a real as3 parser would correctly parse those.
Now part of your work will shift from hand-converting files to hand-annotating files, but that might be ok for you.
Have the parser parse your classes and define actions based on your metadata that will determine what kind of objective-c class to generate. If you get this working it could at least get you all your classes, their simple properties and method signatures (getting the body of the methods converted might be a bit too much to ask but you could include it as a comment so you'd have a nice reference while hand-translating).
PS: if you make this into a one way process be very sure you don't need to re-generate it later - it would be bad if you find out that you have been modifying the generated code and somehow need to re-generate all those classes -- that would mean you'll have to redo all your hard work!
I've started putting a tool together to take the edge off the menial aspects of this process.
I'm trying to figure out if there's enough interest to make it clean and stable enough to release for others to use. I may just do it anyway.
http://meanwhileatthelab.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/automating-process-of-converting-as3-to.html
It's so far saving me a lot of time while porting one of my fairly large games from AS3 to objc.
Check out the Sparrow Framework. It's purported to be designed with Actionscript developers in mind, recreating classes that sort of emulate display list and things like that. You'll have to dive into some "rejiggering" for sure no matter what you do if you don't want to use the CS5 packager.
http://www.sparrow-framework.org/
even if some solution exists, note that architectural logic is DIFFERENT, and many more other details.
Anyway even if posible, You will have a strange hybrid.
I am coming back from WWDC2012, and the message is (as always..) performance anf great user experience.
So You should rewrite using a different programming model.
Our application is interfacing with a lot of web services these days. We have our own package that someone wrote a few years back using UTL_HTTP and it generally works, but needs some hard-coding of the SOAP envelope to work with certain systems. I would like to make it more generic, but lack experience to know how many scenarios I would have to deal with. The variations are in what namespaces need to be declared and the format of the elements. We have to handle both simple calls with a few parameters and those that pass a large amount of data in an encoded string.
I know that 10g has UTL_DBWS, but there are not a huge number of use-cases on-line. Is it stable and flexible enough for general use? Documentation
I have used UTL_HTTP which is simple and works. If you face a challenge with your own package, you can probably find a solution in one of the many wrapper packages around UTL_HTTP on the net (Google "consuming web services from pl/sql", leading you to e.g.
http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/9i/ConsumingWebServices9i.php)
The reason nobody is using UTL_DBWS is that it is not functional in a default installed database. You need to load a ton of Java classes into the database, but the standard instructions seem to be defective - the process spews Java errors right and left and ultimately fails. It seems very few people have been willing to take the time to track down the package dependencies in order to make this approach work.
I had this challenge and found and installed the 'SOAP API' package that Sten suggests on Oracle-Base. It provides some good envelope-creation functionality on top of UTL_HTTP.
However there were some limitations that pertain to your question. SOAP_API assumes all requests are simple XML- i.e. only one layer tag hierarchy.
I extended the SOAP_API package to allow the client code to arbitrarily insert an extra tag. So you can insert a sub-level such as , continue to build the request, and remember to insert a closing tag.
The namespace issue was a bear for the project- different levels of XML had different namespaces.
A nice debugging tool that I used is TCP Trace from Pocket Soap.
www.pocketsoap.com/tcptrace/
You set it up like a proxy and watch the HTTP request and response objects between client and server code.
Having said all that, we really like having a SOAP client in the database- we have full access to all data and existing PLSQL code, can easily loop through cursors and call the external app via SOAP when needed. It was a lot quicker and easier than deploying a middle tier with lots of custom Java or .NET code. Good luck and let me know if you'd like to see my enhanced SOAP API code.
We have also used UTL_HTTP in a manner similar to what you have described. I don't have any direct experience with UTL_DBWS, so I hope you can follow up with any information/experience you can gather.
#kogus, no it's a quite good design for many applications. PL/SQL is a full-fledged programming language that has been used for many big applications.
Check out this older post. I have to agree with that post's #1 answer; it's hard to imagine a scenario where this could be a good design.
Can't you write a service, or standalone application, which would talk to a table in your database? Then you could implement whatever you want as a trigger on that table.