Under the Bridge

Here’s a little tutorial of possible utility; how to build an RSS reader for the iPhone!

Whilst that is a pretty straightforward thing to do, this is a little interesting in that it demonstrates the use of NSXMLParser, flying in the face of what appears to be conventional wisdom that one should rely on the cross-platform libxml2 for their XML-parsing iPhone development projects. And people have gone to some work to make that easier with the TouchXML library which, in case we didn’t mention it in our earlier report, is part of the ever more useful touchcode repository over at Google Code.

‘Course, either of the above — or for that matter, anything at all — are probably better than the last time we had to get into that XML parsing thing a lot, which was struggling to make Xerces work in a large cross-platform source base. There were some very … interesting … issues trying to get wchar-based Windows twaddle and OS X style (also known as the “correct” or “real”, type) of characters to work together. Yeeesh. Well out of that, we are!