Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
It seems like there a bunch of ways to do networking in Cocoa: Webkit, NSUrl, CFNetwork, BSD Sockets. Is there any other APIs/Frameworks that are commonly used for networking? I’m trying to understand all the ways to do networking in Cocoa and learn each one’s strength’s and weaknesses.
As a related question, why would anyone use CFSocket? It seems that most things can be done with NSUrl or BSD Sockets. Is CFSocket commonly used in practice?
You can watch the WWDC videos Network Apps for iPhone (Part 1, Part 2) and Networking Best Practices where they suggest to use NSURLConnection for HTTP and HTTPS, the CFSocket/CFStream/NSStream family for other TCP networking, and of course WebKit if you just intend to render web content. They advice against using the low-level BSD sockets, unless you’re writing a server. The higher level frameworks you use, the more things are taken care for you (from DNS resolution to cellular network management, authentication, encryption, run loop integration…) and the more it is integrated to the rest of the Cocoa framework.