Question

I would like to receive Server-Sent Events in my native iOS app however am not using webkit/Safari. From what I’ve found, NSURLConnection is poor fit as it chunks response . I’ve also looked at ZTWebSocket library (obviously nice, but I’m seeking SSE, not web sockets). Would CocoaAsyncSocket be appropriate? Or limited to pure TCP Socket communication?

I have a sneaking suspicion that I am missing something obvious, or there’d be a library or sample for this already. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

After some more research on this, it’s my opinion that the best way to implement Server Sent Events on iOS without WebKit is to use a customized NSConnection/NSRequest toolset. I settled on ASIHTTPRequest . This library allows you to explicitly control persistence attribute on connection object (essential), control data as it is received over the stream, store responses (e.g. in local files), etc.

Not to mention it contains lots of other handy extensions/customizations in the realm of networking (improved Reachability observer, a simplified API for async, a queuing feature, even ability to load entire web pages (CSS, js and all).

On the server side, I’m using cyclone-sse (tornado) and nginx (as a reverse proxy). Pretty exciting, now I can see my SSEs pushed simulataneously to both my iOS simulator and a browser subscriber. Cyclone even handles all the connections and gives me an API which supports simple POST for message pushes (also supports AMQP and Redit)…

Long story short, ASIHTTPRequest was a perfect solution for me.