Monday 14 July 2008
ASIHTTPRequest: An easy to use CFNetwork wrapper for HTTP requests
*** Update: ASIHTTPRequest is now iPhone compatible, Documentation is available here ***
Apple provides two methods for sending data to / loading data from URLs in Cocoa applications. NSURLConnection, and the lower level CFNetwork API.
NSURLConnection is easy to use, but it provides no way to obtain information about upload progress - a pita if your application happens to involve uploading large files.
ASIHTTPRequest is an easy to use wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is suitable for when you want to submit data to an existing web form, or don't want to mess around with SOAP or XML-RPC.
It provides:
- Ability for setting up progress delegates (e.g. NSProgressIndicators) to show information about download AND upload progress
- An easy interface for adding POST data to requests
- The ability to submit files on local drives as part of POST data, analogous to the HTML file input mechanism
- Basic authentication (username and password) support
- Integrated Keychain support
- Based on NSOperation to make queuing requests and background operation easy
You can grab the latest source via git thusly:
$ git clone git://github.com/pokeb/asi-http-request.gitOr just get a tarbar here:
http://github.com/pokeb/asi-http-request/tarball/master
ASIHTTPRequest comes as part of a simple application that demonstrates many of the features above, just look at AppDelegate.m for good pointers on basic usage, or read the comments in ASIHTTPRequest.h for more detail.
ASIHTTPRequest is partly based on code from Apple's ImageClient code samples, so if it doesn't meet your needs, take a look at their CFNetwork examples for more.
ASIHTTPRequest is my first open source Objective-C code. I hope to expand the class and example application further (unit tests, maybe even iphone examples...) in the coming months. If you find it helpful, please do get in touch!
Posted by Ben @ 10:27 PM