HTTP Library Survey

By: Jeremy W. Sherman. Published: . Categories: http foundation obj-c.

15th century print of skeletons dancing and playing musical instruments.

Totentanz by Michael Wolgemut, 1493

Working with the Web seems to be all apps do these days. The stock Foundation URL loading system requires endless ceremony and a lot of work to try to patch it up to anything resembling watch-batteries-included.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Perhaps you’ve seen Kenneth Reitz’s quick and easy Requests library for Python.

Well, you’re not the first person to think that it doesn’t have to be that way in Cocoaland, either.

Better Dead than Red?

A quick survey of search results for “http” over at Cocoapods yields:

Perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern:

Tacking For the Horizon

The next few take a different tack. They also seem to be actively maintained.

Conclusion

The road to the Web from an iOS app is littered with corpses. We’re stuck with the Foundation mummy, but you might as well pick a fresher partner for your own Totentanz. AFNetworking certainly has some life left.

There’s also room for a Cocoa Toolbox site along the lines of the Clojure Toolbox. It’s great we’ve something of a dependency management system now, but without a well-curated guide, we’ve more of a run-down museum than a lively workshop.

The image above is a 15th Century print by Michael Wolgemut, found on Wikipedia. Dude’s been dead long enough we can at least use his work freely. Unless someone holds a submarine patent on display of over-half-a-millenium–old prints on the Internet. I mean, shopping carts on the Internet were a major brainwave, right? No-one would ever have thought of that.