HessianObjC

The trunk now has support initial support for the Hessian 2.0 protocol. Thanks Tore Halset for the patch, here are his patch notes.

Things to note:
* It is tested against a hessian-3.1.6 server
* hessian-3.1.6 has a bug in its enum encoding that this patch has a simple workaround for. When/if the bug is fixed in the java implementation, the workaround must be removed. See http://bugs.caucho.com/view.php?id=2662
* ref-handling has been improved. The object is now alloc’ed before adding to the refArray. Before this fix, getting a reffed object would always result in a NSDictionary, not the real object.

Things to do:
* more data types. I think compact double/float/binary is missing.
* fix byte order stuff for iPhone.

Another binary has been released to address an Intel endian issue when encoding doubles, HessianObjC v.0.6.1 Framework.

New binaries have been released.

Here is a short change log:

- Added ref support.
- Fixed memory leak in HessianCall class.
- Fixed bug when sending NSData.
- Fixed encoding of NSCalendarDate.

I’d also like to thank Tore Halset from the Apache Cayenne project for his contributions. http://cayenne.apache.org/

You can get the latest framework at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hessianobjc

subscribe/unsubscribe the HessianObjC mailing list here

Get it will it’s fresh SourceForge download

view the API documentation online here

I have commit the initial import to sourceforge.net. No binaries have been released yet. The latest source is available from sourceforge.net using the following command: svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/hessianobjc/trunk hessianobjc.

The current project only supporting building the framework on XCode 2.2 as a universal binary. However, with little modification the code should compile for 10.3.9 (and possible ealier).

This initial import includes:

• Encoding/Decoding of Hessian Web Services binary format from/to NSData and support for NSCoding. This allows any object that supports NSCoding (keyed archiving) to be serialized and deserialized using the Hessian binary protocol.
• Calling remote methods using Hessian codecs via HTTP layered on top of Apple’s URL Loading System (NSHTTPURLConnection etc.). This includes support for both synchronous and asynchronous calls.
• Support for remote/local class mapping. This allows ObjC clients to send POO’s (hehe, Plain Old Objects) over the wire that can then be instiated in the remote server/clients runtime. More on this will be coming shortly to the documentation section near you.

Todo:

• Testing. An important test would be to make sure the unit tests pass on an Intel Mac. I have attempted to address endian issues but cannot be sure without Intel hardware.
• Refinement, more robust error handling / reporting.
• Support for headers as specified in the Hessian protocol docs, currently headers in requests and responses are not supported, this is minor and should be available shortly.
• Currently the code base has mainly been client focused. It would be helpful to have an ObjC http server that was able to respond to Hessian RPC calls. The focus should be on making the HTTP server embeddable in applications (no need to reinvent Apache, LightHTTPD etc). This is of low priority at the moment.
• Documentation, this will be coming soon. For now you can look at the tests as an example of how to use the sync call. Example code will also be coming soon.

Things are going smoothly with the project setup. A project has been created on SourceForge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hessianobjc.

As most developers know, getting the project setup along with all the supporting documents can be more work than actually writing and testing code. Go figure.

There is currently no source code available but I aiming to get an initial import up on SourceForge.net by the end of next week (10th March 06)