Alternative to building a proper web service for iPhone app to consume

Question

I am in the process of scoping the development of an iPhone app for a client. Among other things, the app will allow users to browse through and place orders on specific (tangible) products.

The client has a website that currently does a similar thing and due to their limited budget and the fact that the website runs on a third-party proprietary platform which they have no control over, we are investigating possible alternatives to building a web service.

On the website, user registration and authentication, as well as order placing is done through POST requests via secure HTTP. The response is always a formatted HTML page which will contain strings indicating whether the request was successful or not, and if there was an error, what the error is etc.

So provided I can replicate the POST requests on the phone, and parse the HTML responses to read the results of each request, do you think this is an acceptable alternative to building a web service to handle this?

Apart from the possibility of pages changing (which we can manage) and the fact that I will probably have to download and parse a relatively large HTML response, are there any other drawbacks to this solution and is there anything else that I might be missing?

Many thanks in advance for your thoughts. Cheers, Rog

Answer 1

You could create an intermediary server that will communicate with the client server, and on it expose some REST web services with json (small overhead and easy to handle) responses that will be consumed by the iPhone app.