There's a lot to be said for a networking library that you can wrap your head around. API design matters, too. Code at its best is poetry, and should be designed to delight (but never surprise).
AFNetworking is a delightful networking library for iOS and Mac OS X. It's built on top of familiar Foundation network classes, using NSOperation for scheduling and concurrency, and blocks for convenience and flexibility. It's designed to make common tasks easy, and to make complex tasks simple.
Online documentation is available at http://gowalla.github.com/AFNetworking/.
To install the docset directly into your local Xcode organizer, first install appledoc, and then clone this project and run appledoc -p AFNetworking -c "Gowalla" --company-id com.gowalla AFNetworking/*.h
Be sure to download and run the example projects for iOS and Mac. Both example projects serve as models of how one might integrate AFNetworking into their own project.
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"https://gowalla.com/users/mattt.json"]];
AFJSONRequestOperation *operation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) {
NSLog(@"Name: %@ %@", [JSON valueForKeyPath:@"first_name"], [JSON valueForKeyPath:@"last_name"]);
} failure:nil];
NSOperationQueue *queue = [[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init] autorelease];
[queue addOperation:operation];NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.groups.browse&api_key=b6300e17ad3c506e706cb0072175d047&cat_id=34427469792%40N01&format=rest"]];
AFXMLRequestOperation *operation = [AFXMLRequestOperation XMLParserRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, NSXMLParser *XMLParser) {
XMLParser.delegate = self;
[XMLParser parse];
} failure:nil];
NSOperationQueue *queue = [[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init] autorelease];
[queue addOperation:operation];UIImageView *imageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0f, 0.0f, 100.0f, 100.0f)];
[imageView setImageWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://i.imgur.com/r4uwx.jpg"] placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"placeholder-avatar"]];// AFGowallaAPIClient is a subclass of AFHTTPClient, which defines the base URL and default HTTP headers for NSURLRequests it creates
[[AFGowallaAPIClient sharedClient] getPath:@"/spots/9223" parameters:nil success:^(id response) {
NSLog(@"Name: %@", [response valueForKeyPath:@"name"]);
NSLog(@"Address: %@", [response valueForKeyPath:@"address.street_address"]);
} failure:nil];NSData *imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation([UIImage imageNamed:@"avatar.jpg"], 0.5);
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[AFHTTPClient sharedClient] multipartFormRequestWithMethod:@"POST" path:@"/upload" parameters:nil constructingBodyWithBlock: ^(id <AFMultipartFormData>formData) {
[formData appendPartWithFileData:data mimeType:@"image/jpeg" name:@"avatar"];
}];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request] autorelease];
[operation setUploadProgressBlock:^(NSUInteger totalBytesWritten, NSUInteger totalBytesExpectedToWrite) {
NSLog(@"Sent %d of %d bytes", totalBytesWritten, totalBytesExpectedToWrite);
}];
NSOperationQueue *queue = [[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init] autorelease];
[queue addOperation:operation];NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"https://gowalla.com/friendships/request?user_id=1699"]];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request] autorelease];
operation.completionBlock = ^ {
if ([operation hasAcceptableStatusCode]) {
NSLog(@"Friend Request Sent");
} else {
NSLog(@"[Error]: (%@ %@) %@", [operation.request HTTPMethod], [[operation.request URL] relativePath], operation.error);
}
};
NSOperationQueue *queue = [[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init] autorelease];
[queue addOperation:operation];NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://localhost:8080/encode"]];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request] autorelease];
operation.inputStream = [NSInputStream inputStreamWithFileAtPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"large-image" ofType:@"tiff"]];
operation.outputStream = [NSOutputStream outputStreamToMemory];
NSOperationQueue *queue = [[[NSOperationQueue alloc] init] autorelease];
[queue addOperation:operation];AFNetworking requires either iOS 4.0 and above, or Mac OS 10.6 and above.
If you are including AFNetworking in a project that uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) enabled, you will need to set the -fno-objc-arc compiler flag on all of the AFNetworking source files. To do this in Xcode, go to your active target and select the "Build Phases" tab. In the "Compiler Flags" column, set -fno-objc-arc for each of the AFNetworking source files.
Although this is suboptimal, forking the project into an ARC and non-ARC branch would be extremely difficult to maintain. On the bright side, we're very excited about CocoaPods as a potential solution.
AFNetworking was created by Scott Raymond and Mattt Thompson in the development of Gowalla for iPhone.
TTTLocationFormatter, used in the example project, is part of FormatterKit, created by Mattt Thompson.
Mattt Thompson
Scott Raymond
AFNetworking is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.