JSON vs. Plist for Sending Web Service Data to iPhone Apps

Sam Soffes:

What I found was very surprising. TouchJSON actually beat plists. It was slightly faster in every test I ran. This is awesome because plists have a much larger file size. They are usually about twice as big as JSON files due to all of the extra markup.

Count me in with Wolf: I wish Apple had just updated the old plist text format — which looks remarkably like JSON — instead of going XML.

(Another great web site design, too.)

Update 1: A bit of chirping on Twitter complaining that Soffes should have used the binary plist format, rather than XML. But how do you create binary plist data from web apps written in Ruby, Python, PHP or whatever, if they aren’t running on Mac OS X? I don’t think the binary plist format is documented by Apple.

Update 2: Dave Dribin points to this open source Core Foundation code, where the binary plist format is documented in the comments.

★ Thursday, 29 October 2009