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Comment by Maakuth | Hacker News Reader

I've never tried iOS development, and I'm a bit surprised by many of these library recommendations. For example HTTP requests, regular expressions and progress indicators strike me as something your platform definitely should provide you with. Of course it's great that there are quality libraries to fill in where the platform falls short.

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Most of the functionality is there, it is just lower level coding than is required for many purposes. Sure, you can do HTTP requests, but if you are interacting with a ReSTful service, having a wrapper that understands ReST is better.

These libraries exist because iOS (IMHO) is too low level in places, such as HTTP requests. There is an interface you have to implement in order to make HTTP requests, and you have to handle all the data (bytes) that come in incrementally. It is very handy to have a library that handles the connection, caching, redirects, errors, etc.

The NSURLConnection class is actually pretty high level and does in fact handle things like caching, redirects, errors, etc. for you. I have been using ASIHttpRequest for a while -- it's not bad but can feel quite heavy at times. For future projects, I may roll my own HTTP lib by wrapping NSURLConnection directly. Btw, GCD and blocks in iOS 4 make it super easy to structure your network calls the same way you would in JavaScript with xmlhttprequest and closures, which makes async code much cleaner and easier to write.

Even on platforms where making an http request is still only a few lines of standard library code (ruby, nodejs, python) -- there is still a vast selection of libraries that make it easier for you. (httparty, request, etc)

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