A Pure Swift 2 Implementation of MKNetworkKit

Why MKNetworkKit?

Actually, you don't need a networking framework today (post iOS 7). We live in the era of NSURLSession and with networking becoming a core feature of every app, you need to know how to write a good networking stack without using a third party library.

Now, you may ask, So, why are there so many networking frameworks? Almost every iOS developer I know uses one or the other networking library.

Well, that's because, when iOS was introduced, the two frameworks built into the iPhone (iOS) SDK, namely, CFNetwork.framework and NSURLConnection(Foundation.framework) were complicated to understand and use. Though NSURLConnection was easier than CFNetwork it still wasn't easy enough for most developers.

With iOS 7, Apple introduced NSURLSession based networking that blew everything out of water.

Using NSURLSession is super easy to use. Most of today's third party networking frameworks that exist today are built on top of NSURLSession. With deprecation of NSURLConnection in iOS 9 (tvOS 9.0 marks NSURLConnection as unavailable), you don't even need to know the "basics" like NSURLConnection. In fact, NSURLSession is the new "basics". NSURLSession is the class that you should learn, if you are doing networking today.

In my opinion, the only benefits of using a networking framework instead of NSURLSession are

Easier Authentication (www-authenticatebased and client certificate/server trust based) Authentication with NSURLSession still requires delegate handling like NSURLConnection

Multi-part form upload

In addition to the above, MKNetworkKit has the following features.

Queued Requests (Batch a bunch of requests and get notified once they are done) High performance background caching (based on HTTP 1.1 caching specs) built in Fetching remote images are done using extension methods in strings. Just call the loadRemoteImage method on any URL String and get the image in the completion handler. What's more? All these fetched images are automatically cached and you don't need a separate image caching library. Auto network indicator support MKNetworkKit manages the display of status bar network indicator for you. (on iOS only) cURL-able debug lines Fully compatible with application extensions Background image decompression Background completion Full support for NSStreams