Awesome

NetworkKit

A lightweight iOS, Mac and Watch OS framework that makes networking and parsing super simple. Uses the open-sourced JSONHelper with functional parsing. For networking the library supports basic GET, POST, DELETE HTTP requests.

Install

Cocoapods

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Cocoa projects. You can install it with the following command:

$ gem install cocoapods

To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:

source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'
platform :ios, '8.0'
use_frameworks!

pod 'NetworkKit'

Then run the folloring command:

$ pod install

Carthage

Carthage is a decentralized dependency manager that builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks.

You can install Carthage with Homebrew using the following command:

$ brew update
$ brew install carthage

To integrate NetworkKit into your Xcode project using Carthage, add it into your Cartfile:

github "imex94/NetworkKit" ~> 1.3

Run carthage update to build the framework and drag the built NetworkKit.framework into your Xcode project under Target - General - Embedded binaries:

Usage

NetworkKitExample project provides a guidance to get started.

For the purpose of this example, let say we want to download one of the stories from Hacker News. For this let's use their API endpoint - https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/11245652.json?print=pretty, which give us the following JSON response:

{
  "by": "jergason",
  "id": 11245652,
  "kids": [
    11245801,
    11245962,
    11250239,
    11246046
  ],
  "time": 1457449896,
  "title": "CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs",
  "type": "story"
}

We want to deserialize the JSON response above to Swift object. To do this, we need a struct that conforms the protocol Deserializable and implement the required init(data: [String: AnyObject]) constructor and use the deserialization operator (<--):

import NetworkKit

struct NKItem: Deserializable {
    var id: Int?
    var username: String?
    var kids: [Int]?
    var title: String?
    var type: String?
    var date: NSDate?

    init(data: [String : AnyObject]) {
        id <-- data["id"]
        username <-- data["by"]
        kids <-- data["kids"]
        title <-- data["title"]
        type <-- data["type"]
        date <-- data["time"]
    }
}

To connect to an API and perform a GET request is simple and intuitive and parsing is like magic:

NKHTTPRequest.GET(
  "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/11245652.json",                
  params: ["print": "pretty"],
  success: { data in
      var item: NKItem?
      item <-- data                                        
  },
  failure: { error in
      print(error.message)
  })

API

Networking

GET

A simple HTTP GET method to get request from a url.

urlString - String <br /> The string representing the url. <br />

params (Optional) - [NSObject: AnyObject]? <br /> The parameters you need to pass with the GET method. Everything after '?'. <br />

success - ((AnyObject) -> Void) <br /> Successful closure in case the request was successful. <br />

failure - ((NKHTTPRequestError) -> Void) <br /> Failure Closure which notifies if any error has occurred during the request. <br />

POST

A simple HTTP POST method to post a resource to the url.

urlString - String <br /> The string representing the url.

params (Optional) - [NSObject: AnyObject]? <br /> The body you need to pass with the POST method. Resources you want to pass. <br />

success - ((AnyObject) -> Void) <br /> Successful closure in case the request was successful. <br />

failure - ((NKHTTPRequestError) -> Void) <br /> Failure Closure which notifies if any error has occured during the request. <br />

DELETE

A simple HTTP DELETE method to delete a resource from the server.

urlString - String <br /> The string representing the url. <br />

params (Optional) - [NSObject: AnyObject]? <br /> The body you need to pass with the DELETE method. Resources you want to delete. <br />

success - ((AnyObject) -> Void) <br /> Successful closure in case the request was successful. <br />

failure - ((NKHTTPRequestError) -> Void) <br /> Failure Closure which notifies if any error has occured during the request. <br />

Cancel HTTP Requests

There are error and internet availability checking implemented in the framework, but you can simply cancel any task you want if its needed:

let dataTask = NKHTTPRequest.GET(
  "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/11245652.json",
  params: ["print": "pretty"],
  success: { data in

  },
  failure: { error in
    print(error.message)
})

dataTask?.cancel()

Parsing

Simple use of parsing can be seen above. There are more advanced options to use

Assigning default values

struct NKItem: Deserializable {
    var id = 0
    var username = ""

    init(data: [String : AnyObject]) {
        id <-- data["id"]
        username <-- data["by"]
    }
}

NSURL Deserialization

let profileImage: NSURL?
profileImage <-- "https://example.com/images/profile_normal.png"

NSDate Deserialization

let date: NSDate?
date <-- 1414172803 // timestamp to NSDate deserialization

Nested JSON

Let's consider a the truncated version of the Twitter API response:

{
  "text":"Aggressive Ponytail #freebandnames",
  "retweet_count": 2,
  "user":{  
      "name":"Sean Cummings",
      "location":"LA, CA",
      "verified":false,
      "screen_name":"sean_cummings"
  }
}

Where you can just simply create a User and a Tweet structure with a user instance inside:

struct NKTwitterUser: Deserializable {
    var name = ""
    var location = ""
    var verified = false
    var screenName = ""

    init(data: [String : AnyObject]) {
        name <-- data["name"]
        location <-- data["location"]
        verified <-- data["verified"]
        screenName <-- data["screen_name"]
    }
}

struct NKTweet: Deserializable {
    var text = ""
    var retweetCount = 0
    var user: NKTwitterUser?

    init(data: [String : AnyObject]) {
        text <-- data["text"]
        retweetCount <-- data["retweet_count"]
        user <-- data["user"]
    }
}

It's that simple.

License

NetworkKit is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info. MIT ⓒ Alex Telek