It's normally done with whatever you feel comfortable in.

Lots of people use xml these days, or some more specific XML formats (like RDF/RSS/Atom, etc)

I have no idea what it is that you're trying to do, and what sort of info you're trying to pass. XML can be a very inefficient interchange format. If you're passing around a lot of small values, you can end up using more bandwidth for your structures than for your actual values. (especially for RPC/Encoded SOAP).

You know how likely the information that you need is going to change, and how much control you have over both ends of the process. I would assume that you'd want to work in something that you can easily work with to serialize and deserialize your data.

Some people will pass plain text, and parse it. Others will use a data exchange format (LDIF, XML, whatever), and others will pass along formatting information, too (HTML, etc.)

Yes, this could be a good learning experience, for you to force yourself to learn something new, but depending on how important the process is, it might be better to stick with the familiar.

In reply to Re: Desktop program getting web data by jhourcle
in thread Desktop program getting web data by kiat

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