OpenFire Client webservice restfull client iphone

I would like your advice kindly. I would like to develop a chat for iphone using devices such as OpenFire server. I saw that there is a framwork for iphone to interact and connect to the server co OpenFire. Unfortunately, this framework is not easy to use. I was thinking of creating a webservice in java restfull to establish connections between clients. I wanted to know if this process kindly architecture and correctly? will be very slow? Thanks in advance for your advice.