networking

Users always want more. With a background URLSession, we can give them more by extending downloads and uploads beyond the app's lifespan. Here, we look at building a solution to take advantage of a background session to download adorable cat photos 😸.

Codable is a potent tool for simplifying handling API responses. However, sometimes API responses aren't simple. Here, we look at how to handle decoding a JSON response where the returned types keep changing.

Many of us feel nervous when meeting a group of people for the first time. Your app is the same. Here, we look at how SSDP can offer a convenient way for your app to get to know its local network and overcome those nerves.

Operations have a reputation for being chunky, especially compared to GCD. However, once you get to know operations, you realise that they are the OOP approach to concurrency in iOS. Here, we look at how to use operations to build a networking layer by encapsulating multiple steps into one unit.

In iOS, we can use background-transfers to extend the life of our downloads and uploads beyond the app's lifespan, offering our users a better experience by using a background URLSession. Here, we look at how to build that better experience.

Every time a user has to wait for a network request to complete before they can get on with their task, we risk losing them. With pausable downloads, we can ensure that even a cancelled download isn't wasted. Here, we look at how to resume a cancelled download to minimise wait times.

We want to test that our network stacks can make network requests as intended but without actually making those requests. Here, we look at how to split our networking stack into components to allow easy unit testing.

In "Coalescing NSOperations" I wrote about coalescing NSOperations however, during the writing of that article, I began to explore other ways that I could coalesce operations. One solution I discovered has all the benefits of the previous coalescing approach but significantly reduces the a

This post is now outdated, please instead check out my newer post on Coalescing Operations for my latest solution to coalescing operations - I'm leaving this here in case anyone needs it. In "Networking with NSOperation as your wingman" I wrote about combining NSURLSession with N

I've been building iOS apps since iOS v3 and most of the apps that I've created have had to connect to APIs to populate their UI. The technologies used to connect to these APIs and consume their content has changed over the years but I keep coming back to the same pattern parsing the respons

Social networks work on the basis of presenting a feed and allowing the user to interact with the content contained in the feed in (hopefully) novel and interesting ways that the user derives usefulness (joy?) from. The presentation of the feed varies greatly from social network to social network bu

This post is based on an Objective-C example. If you are more interested in seeing how to combine networking and operations based on a Swift example, head over to the more recent "Building a networking layer with operations" post. The beautiful and maddening thing about programming i

Here we're going to go through an implementation of parsing xml into a model class. This comprises of: 1. A xml message 2. A service call layer 3. A parser - in two parts 4. A factory XML Message <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <getUserDetailsRe