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AFNetworking
Houston iPhone Developers Meetup
October 25th, 2011

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Who?
• Full time contractiOSdeveloper out ofTheWoodlands
• Contact me athttp://ipanemalabs.com
• Founderof Houston iPhone Developers Meetup
• Organizer of Houston PHP Users Group
• Personal iPhone apps onstoresince 2008
• Personal site athttp://pessoal.org
AFNetworking

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Tonight’s session
• Overview of what AFNetworking provides
• Background on the project
• Alternatives to it
• Bunch of code examples
• Feel free to ask questions
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Background
• Open-source library shared by Gowalla
• Available at https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking
• Created in the development of Gowalla for iPhone
• Inspired by an Apple sample project (MVC Networking)
• Uses Objective-C blocks for everything (requires iOS 4+)
• MIT license
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More background
• Main authors very active behind the project
• Mattt Thompson - http://mattt.me
• Scott Raymond - http://scottraymond.net
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Alternatives
• ASIHTTPRequest
• Convenience wrapper with lots of useful features
• Author decided to stop maintaining it
• NSURLConnection
• Lots of tedious / boilerplate code to manage HTTP requests
• Other options
• RestKit - http://restkit.org
• SVHTTPRequest - http://github.com/samvermette/SVHTTPRequest
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AFNetworking features
• Uses NSOperation for scheduling and concurrency
• Blocks for request completion / failure callbacks
• Convenience features:
• Requests for JSON, XML, Image data, etc
• File upload with progress callback
• API client request
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Installation
• Clone AFNetworking github project
• Copy “AFNetworking” sub-folder to your own Xcode project
• Clone JSONKit github project
• https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit
• Copy JSONKit.h and JSONKit.m to your own Xcode project
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Great documentation
• Provides appledoc compatible documentation
• Appledoc available at https://github.com/tomaz/appledoc
• git clone https://github.com/tomaz/appledoc.git
• sudo sh install-appledoc.sh
• Installs on /usr/local/bin
• git clone https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking.git
• cd AFNetworking
• appledoc -p AFNetworking -c "Gowalla" --company-id com.gowalla
AFNetworking/*.h
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Documentation
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Blocks
• Closures for Objective-C
• Similar in nature to JavaScript closures, but slightly different
• Great for callback-centric code
• Available since iOS 4
• Used a lot in Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
• Great introduction documentation available from Apple
• http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/Conceptu
al/Blocks/Articles/00_Introduction.html
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Blocks
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Core classes
• Library core is AFURLConnectionOperation
• NSOperation subclass to make asynchronous requests
• Subclasses
• AFJSONRequestOperation – JSON requests
• AFXMLRequestOperation – XML requests
• AFPropertyListRequestOperation – Plist requests
• AFImageRequestOperation – Image requests
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JSON request
• Dependency on JSONKit
• Very high performance JSON library
• Benchmark results available at https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit
• Claimed to be faster than parsing/serializing binary plists.
• Results contested by TouchJSON author
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JSON request
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XML request
• Similar to JSON request, but no automatic parsing of payload
• Block callback allows you to kick off the XML parsing
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XML request
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Image request
• Load remote images on UIImageView asynchronously
• Alternative to EGOImageView and similar libraries
• Great on table view cells, async requests get canceled as cells are re-used
• Simple interface to load images
• -[UIImageView setImageWithURL:placeholderImage:]
• More control available through a different method
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Image request
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API request
• AFHTTPClient at the core
• Detects appropriate operation for each request
• AFGowallaAPIClient subclass of that
• Easy to extend core class with the business logic for your own web service
implementation
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AFGowallaAPIClient
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More information
• AFNetworking post on Gowalla’s Engineering blog
• http://engineering.gowalla.com/2011/10/24/afnetworking/
• Github pages
• Great information on issue list, network graph
• Mattt’s profile page - https://github.com/mattt/
• TTTAttributedLabel - https://github.com/mattt/TTTAttributedLabel
• FormatterKit - https://github.com/mattt/FormatterKit
AFNetworking

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Contact: