

IOS Developers, It's Time To Ditch ASIHTTPRequest - matttthompson
https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking

======
allwein
Somehow, I don't think I'm going to be ditching a well-maintained library I've
been using for over 2 years that's integrated with all of my code at this
point for a 2 month old project at version 0.3.0. Especially since there's
nothing that stands out on what this library does (if anything) better.

Give me a nice blog post with some of the details on how this makes my life
easier or more productive compared to ASIHTTPRequest and I'll think about it.
As it is, it's just Yet Another Networking Library.

~~~
matttthompson
Point taken; sensational headline is sensational.

ASI is a respectable library, certainly. It's been around for a long time, and
it does everything you could possibly conceive of. Problem is, for most
people, it does too much, and as a result, doesn't do anything particularly
well.

AFNetworking does 2 things really well: API requests and image loading. 80% of
the time, this is all that's necessary. For when it isn't, AFNetworking is
small, understandable, and encapsulates most information in familiar
Foundation classes (eg. NSURLRequest), which makes it much easier to extend
than ASI.

It's a ways off from having the maturity of ASI, but I see a lot of promise in
AFNetworking's design, and I'll do what it takes to keep improving it. Keep a
look out for a blog post and better documentation in the coming weeks.

------
saurik
FWIW, Apple has stated that developers should not develop libraries that use
the "first two capital letters are a namespace" paradigm, as you are just
asking for a conflict with a future Apple-supported library. Like identifiers
beginning with _ in C, [A-Z]{2} is "reserved".

(Yes: I, myself, am an offender here, but I've been careful in all new code,
and even MobileSubstrate has been adding new symbols using "Subtrate _"
instead of "MS_ ".)

~~~
matttthompson
Yeah, I'm well-aware of that, too. But it was too tempting to do a NextStep-
style vestigial prefix (Gowalla was previously named Alamofire, hence AF).
Fingers crossed that Apple doesn't release "Apple Framework" anytime soon.

