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It seems that when people want to pass data from the client to the server, almost everybody just uses web services. Is the best way to do this when you don't need the performance of straight TCP?

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1 Answer 1

Yes, web services standards are the modern way to do these things.

Note that in certain environments, performance can also be accommodated. In a pure .NET to .NET environment, one can use binary transfer over TCP/IP, with little or no change to the code. Of course, this doesn't work if one or both sides are not running .NET.

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What about when you need 2 way communication, do people use a Comet based approach, WCF duplexing, or "Clients" that also expose callbacks as a web service, so each client is also a server, and the server is also a client? –  DevDevDev Oct 7 '09 at 0:32
"yes", or "all of the above" –  John Saunders Oct 7 '09 at 0:35
Do you know of the best one to use for the iPhone? There is no good JSON-RPC or XML-RPC server that runs natively on the iPhone, so the last is out of the question. WCF Duplexing obviously won't work. From what I've seen the STOMP/Jabber stuff on the iPhone isn't very robust either. Sort of leaves straight TCP does it not? –  DevDevDev Oct 7 '09 at 0:38
I don't know enough about iPhone to know which would be best. In particular, I don't know how best to deal with two-way communications on a mobile platform. –  John Saunders Oct 7 '09 at 4:38

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