CFPropertyList — PHP and Ruby Libraries for Generating Binary Plists

Remember this link two weeks ago, where Sam Soffes discovered that for iPhone apps that take data from web services, JSON (parsed with TouchJSON) out-performed XML property lists?

The most common pro-plist retort was that of course XML plists were slow and one should use the binary plist format instead — smaller to transmit, faster to parse. And on iPhone OS, every bit of size reduction and speed counts. The problem with binary plists is how do you generate them from a non-Mac OS X server?

Ends up there’s an open source PHP library by Rodney Rehm and Christian Kruse that does just that, and a Ruby version too.

★ Tuesday, 10 November 2009