HTTPKit — A lightweight HTTP server framework for Objective-C | Hacker News Reader

HTTPKit — A lightweight HTTP server framework for Objective-C

github.com

42 pointsfyolnish30 comments

There is also: https://github.com/robbiehanson/CocoaHTTPServer

This works on Cocoa an iOS and supports:

    - Built in support for bonjour broadcasting
    - IPv4 and IPv6 support
    - Asynchronous networking using GCD and standard sockets
    - Password protection support
    - SSL/TLS encryption support
    - Extremely FAST and memory efficient
    - Extremely scalable (built entirely upon GCD)
    - Heavily commented code
    - Very easily extensible
    - WebDAV is supported too!

(Not the author, just a user).

HTTPKit does support WebDAV, Auth & SSL. But CocoaHTTPServer looks nice as well.

The OP also created a language on top of objective-C. Although I have no interest to learn any more languages, I have to applaude him. Objective-C could be clunky and his language Tranquil, takes some of the productivity of newer languages we've come to expect. Very cool!

They also submitted it to HN a few months ago, but didn't get any comments – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4386177

Could this be used as a method of communicating with an iOS device as if it were a server (e.g. sending updates from a real server to the iOS client (which now behaves like a server))? Somewhat of a replacement for notifications, perhaps?

I doubt it, most mobile connections are behind NAT and/or firewalls, preventing one from connecting to devices.

I used Mongoose [1] to do exactly that for devices that share a local network (auto-discovery and everything). So yes, it's definitely possible :)

[1] http://code.google.com/p/mongoose/

I would love to see a LUA scripting framework built into this. I built an iOS app with an embedded web server, and dealing with dynamic text generation in Objective-C is a pain.

You'd be interested in one of my other projects, TLC then :) It's an objective-c bridge for lua, with which httpkit will work out of the box

https://github.com/fjolnir/TLC

I'll have to try it out. Thanks!

Yes very cool love this also

Really cool, OP. Looking forward to reading through this more thoroughly tomorrow, but I'm a big fan of these types of small side projects.

Can someone please explain the point of something like this? it's so verbose.

Maybe the author had a need for it, built it, and is throwing it out there for anyone else who might have a similar need? Maybe you need to embed a web server in your app for something? Maybe you're really comfortable with ObjC and just want to get a quick server up for prototyping? Maybe you don't find it to be too verbose, and prefer having code that's easily self-documenting instead of relying on framework knowledge? Maybe you like being able to use a framework like Foundation (which has had 20+ years of history)? And so on.

Everything you've mentioned could possibly be a decent reason for this beast. I'd just love to hear what they were. You make something like this for one of two reasons.

1) you've got a lot of spare time on your hands and wanted to test your skills and show your love for a language. Based on the outlandish hello world example (which is useless for most web developers), this is most likely.

2) you had some ridiculous constraints and really absolutely had to build a web sever in objective-c. In this case, a better use case or example would be appreciated.

It was built in order to be able to create web applications in my scripting language called 'tranquil'. (And written in Objective-C to maximize performance)

Here's the first web app to be written using it: https://github.com/fjolnir/experience-tranquility

3) You think that having a common language for all parts of your project could be an advantage, for example sharing your model code. Especially valuable if you've decoupled your model from your delivery framework like Uncle Bob told you ...;-) http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...

4) You find that the very small amount of spare time this sort of thing takes is worth it, even if just for kicks.

5) You miss WebObjects.

6) In addition to having code commonality, you might be interested in performance that allows you to not have to worry about scaling out for much much longer than other common solutions (or requiring rewrites if you're successful). For example, my own embedded Objective-C web lib (based on libmicrohttp) clocks in at around 30K requests/second even when initialized via script on my laptop, whereas something like Sinatra does around 900.

http://blog.metaobject.com/2012/03/30k-requests-aka-wrk-is-f...

http://blog.metaobject.com/2011/12/ruby-and-rails-scalabilit...

7) You think textual verbosity is a good thing when it adds to readability.

8) You want to embed a web-server in your iOS and/or MacOS X app. Peer to peer, like the Internet was originally intended. While it may be possible to achieve with RoR or Sinatra or the like, an ObjC lib is just less hassle.

> 5) You miss pre-v.5 WebObjects

FTFY :)

Thanks! Exactly what I meant :)

In other words: there was a WebObjects after v4? ;-)

The point is fairly apparent. As for verbosity, I'm not sure how you would make it request handling less verbose than a single message send.

Building web frameworks is all the rage.

I use my own HTTP server in my iOS app to export/backup the user's data (as a zip file) to a PC via browser.

This means my customers needn't download a special app on their desktops and I don't need to write them.

The point? It's a light-weight embedded web server in Objective-C. If you need a web server embedded in your Objective-C app, then you can use it.

As for verbosity -- Objective-C stylistically tends to be a little more verbose than other languages (named arguments, no abbreviations, verb-object structured method names). It doesn't need to be but it tends to be as a matter of tradition.

That said, for what it's doing (setting up a web server with 3 different responses and error handling), this is not particularly verbose.

How well is it supported outside Mac OS X?

It should work on anything gnustep does.

I do plan to make it compile with ObjFW, with which it would run pretty much anywhere. Without any hard to set up dependencies.

It should/will obviously also work on iOS, and using an Objective-C web-framework, your iOS device actually performs comparably to Ruby running on big iron. Imagine a server rack filled with old iPhones, or maybe a "server desk drawer" :-)

While I don't know about this kit in particular, I've had good results with both Cocotron and GNUStep in getting ObjC/Cocoa code to Linux and Windows.

Recently, I also had some Objective-C code running on my Android phone, but that sort of thing is experimental and not well-supported yet.

My tools have to be usable in all OS my customers require me to work on, hence my question.

What other OSes do you require? GNUStep lists various BSDs, various Linuxes, HP/UX, Solaris, Windows and some embedded systems:

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Platform_compatibility

I also had a large-ish system running on AIX.

Currently I only do job related work in C++, JVM and .NET.

Never looked too much into GNUStep, because it is not clear to me how far Cocoa and the latest language changes from Apple are supported by gcc and clang + GNUStep.

On my line of work it is the customers that decide the technology, not me, so they have a hard time thrusting Objective-C outside Apple's environment.

Neat, I like it!

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