IOS Developers, It's Time To Ditch ASIHTTPRequest | Hacker News Reader

IOS Developers, It's Time To Ditch ASIHTTPRequest

github.com

Somehow, I don't think I'm going to be ditching a well-maintained library I've been using for over 2 years that's integrated with all of my code at this point for a 2 month old project at version 0.3.0. Especially since there's nothing that stands out on what this library does (if anything) better.

Give me a nice blog post with some of the details on how this makes my life easier or more productive compared to ASIHTTPRequest and I'll think about it. As it is, it's just Yet Another Networking Library.

Point taken; sensational headline is sensational.

ASI is a respectable library, certainly. It's been around for a long time, and it does everything you could possibly conceive of. Problem is, for most people, it does too much, and as a result, doesn't do anything particularly well.

AFNetworking does 2 things really well: API requests and image loading. 80% of the time, this is all that's necessary. For when it isn't, AFNetworking is small, understandable, and encapsulates most information in familiar Foundation classes (eg. NSURLRequest), which makes it much easier to extend than ASI.

It's a ways off from having the maturity of ASI, but I see a lot of promise in AFNetworking's design, and I'll do what it takes to keep improving it. Keep a look out for a blog post and better documentation in the coming weeks.

FWIW, Apple has stated that developers should not develop libraries that use the "first two capital letters are a namespace" paradigm, as you are just asking for a conflict with a future Apple-supported library. Like identifiers beginning with _ in C, [A-Z]{2} is "reserved".

(Yes: I, myself, am an offender here, but I've been careful in all new code, and even MobileSubstrate has been adding new symbols using "Subtrate" instead of "MS".)

Yeah, I'm well-aware of that, too. But it was too tempting to do a NextStep-style vestigial prefix (Gowalla was previously named Alamofire, hence AF). Fingers crossed that Apple doesn't release "Apple Framework" anytime soon.

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