Alamofire: HTTP networking library written in Swift | Hacker News Reader

Alamofire: HTTP networking library written in Swift

nshipster.com

71 pointshswolff12 comments

This is all quite interesting.

I wonder if there are others in my boat, however, who were (in my case minor) iOS developers, and were initially excited by Swift. (I chatted with Chris Lattner at WWDC and thanked him for what looked in the first couple of days like an amazing win.)

But after a while, I began to rebel against the idea of learning a whole new complex language and new environment just to keep doing iOS development.

So in the end this nice clean breakpoint just pushed me back into the "open web" development camp. I'd like my efforts to work on all platforms.

This isn't a plea for sympathy, honest, or an attempt to put down Swift, which looks like a great development--I'm just genuinely curious if others have had this experience.

Swift won't be hard for current iOS developers to learn. The Cocoa API's are the big learning hurdle for iOS development and they are the same with Swift. Once you under stand the basics of the language, after building a couple of projects in it you will be up to speed. I see the sentiment that learning languages isn't hard here all the time and it's mostly true. If you know the fundamentals of programming and the API's well a new language shouldn't be an issue. Anytime I think of going into web dev full time (I do some, not much) I am daunted by the fact I need to know: HTML, CSS, Javascript, a server side language e.g. Ruby, SQL etc. etc. I know bits of each and can get by but it seems like a much more daunting thing to me than learning one language and set of API's that works on a device with very little fragmentation/variation in hardware capability/screen size.

Oh, I understand it's not hard to learn enough to use it with existing Cocoa APIs--it's just that that to learn it deeply would require a major investment.

I've learned dozens of languages (starting with Lisp-like systems) in my nearly 45 years in the biz, so Swift wouldn't be a big challenge. It's more a question of Why? at this point.

Ah, ok. I get how it could be annoying to develop a deep knowledge of yet another language.

I saw Mattt introduce Alamofire at the New York iOS developer meet up and he actually expressed some concern over what seems to be a lot of blind optimism towards Swift in his talk.

> But after a while, I began to rebel against the idea of learning a whole new complex language and new environment just to keep doing iOS development.

It's not really like you actually have to do that if you don't want to, though, at least for a few years. Objective C won't be going away for a long time.

So far it has felt very natural to me. Somehow, and probably largely due to the Cocoa/UIKit frameworks, it feels a _lot_ like Objective-C development. Things like safely unwrapping optionals, rather than the verbose respondsToSelector checks everywhere, feel like a big improvement.

I would love to see RestKit get re-imagined this same way. If for nothing else than to see more examples of large/complex projects written in Swift. Give other in-depth examples of the language.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire

Hate to be that guy, but I am that guy; I would like to see RestKit renamed as it has nothing to do with REST, n.b. Hardcoded, upfront mappings. The amount of boilerplate is insane.

It looks nice as intended. Related note, I have found a lot of the cruft is needed in building and accessing the JSON bits, of which I only saw a small example on your page. Even then, I'm not sure how much I like the approximated syntax. Worried that it might be confusing it you don't look carefully for braces.

Mattt Thompson kicking ass and taking names per usual :)

Has anyone ever found out if @Mattt is actually human? I mean, with the quality and volume of work he produces he quite obviously doesn't ever sleep

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