Is ServiceStack really appropriate for iOS/Objective-C clients?

Question

I'm developing an iOS/Objective-C Enterprise application that needs access to a SQL Server back-end via a hosted C# service. WCF is the obvious choice for the plumbing, but like most Microsoft development technologies, once you get beyond a simple demo app, it gets pretty ugly.

I came across ServiceStack and it looks much nicer than WCF. It worries me that I can find almost no references to anybody else using an iOS/Objective-C client (although I do see a couple references to iOS/Mono ServiceStack clients).

ServiceStack is clearly focused on standard protocols so i'm sure it can do the job, but I have the nagging feeling that I'm missing something. Am I trying to drive nails with a blender or something?

What's the mainstream solution for iOS/Objective-C developers connecting to a back-end SQL Server database?

Answer 1

From the outside you can think of ServiceStack as just shipping clean JSON over the wire, although ServiceStack does provide a nice story for .NET clients by being able to share typed DTOs to provide an end-to-end Typed API for free, i.e. without any code-gen or additional effort. The web service output itself is clean and doesn't have any coupling to ServiceStack and can be easily consumed with the standard JSON or XML serializers in each of the respective platforms.

The swedishstartupspace.com recently posted how they built their winning SLussen iOS mobile app in a day at the Uppsala Hackathon. They used the native iOS RestKit library to consume their back-end ServiceStack API.

Others have used Xamarin.iOS front-end to build native iOS apps in C#, there's also a course on PluralSight showcasing how to use c# to develop Xamarin.iOS native mobile apps talking to a ServiceStack back-end.