Alamofire: HTTP Networking in Swift | Hacker News Reader

Alamofire: HTTP Networking in Swift

github.com

99 pointsmatttthompson28 comments

Creator of Alamofire here. Just pushed the 1.0.0 release. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

Looks like a great lib with a nice API, thx.

Was there any reason why you chose callbacks over a Promise-like pattern for the async responses?

Also do you know of any good HTTP Server libraries that will let you develop simple HTTP JSON services in Swift?

See Moya for a lib built on top of AlamoFire that adds reactive signals (fulfilling the promises use case): https://github.com/AshFurrow/Moya

> Was there any reason why you chose callbacks over a Promise-like pattern for the async responses?

Deeply-nested networking callbacks are a code smell, and I find that promises often do more harm by hiding those smells—or worse, obscuring the flow itself. In practice, Alamofire is mostly going to be single or at most nested two levels deep anyway.

In the README it looks like using the ObjC AFNetworking is suggested if one wishes to do multipart http requests, I assume this is up to date and Alamofire doesn't support this at this time?

Yes, that's correct.

Is there any way to add custom HTTP header yet? This would make for a nice API:

  Alamofire.request(.GET, "http://httpbin.org/get")
           .header("custom-header", "value")

The short answer: Use the version of `request` that takes a `URLRequestConvertible`, and specify the header fields in that.

The long answer: Custom headers on a per-request basis are a bit of a red herring, from an API design perspective. In reality, most use cases boil down to one of three, which are taken care of in other ways:

- Default headers, such as `User-Agent`, are specified in `NSURLSessionConfiguration -HTTPAdditionalHeaders`. - `Authorization` headers, which are handled by `NSURLCredential` and `NSURLAuthenticationChallenge`. - `Content-Type` headers, which are handled by `ParameterEncoding`.

This is why Alamofire is designed the way it is.

Awesome!

What about supporting using something like PromiseKit for error handling and interoperability with aggregation methods? Would you be willing to consider that?

Thanks for your work by the way.

I don't really see much need for it. Others are welcome to create such an integration, but I probably won't do so myself.

Aggregation of multiple requests with centralized error handling would be really nice, I guess that could be built from the outside though.

Hey Matt! A few:

* Is this being used in any apps in the App Store currently by you? (or Panic?)

* Is Alamofire a non-profit or some kind of organization? Curious why it's listed in the README.

* Perhaps a bit deeper: Why a rewrite of AFNetworking's feature set instead of a AFN 3.0?

Congrats on this release!

However, I think the library name is a bit of a poor choice. I don't want to take away your thunder, I just picked this post to do my rant :).

There seems to be a lot of new general-purpose libraries with very poor non-descriptive names coming out.

Whenever I need to dive into a new codebase, in a language and ecosystem I'm unfamiliar with, it's extremely hard to figure out which dependency and library does what. I was tasked to dive into a massive RoR application recently, and I ended up having to write a glossary first to remember what every non-descriptive noun implied.

After getting familiar with a particular language's ecosystem, this problem becomes tends to go away, and as a library writer, it becomes easier to fall into the same trap by picking a name that's marketable and distinct.

But I feel we're collectively making it increasingly harder for people to ramp up in new ecosystems and maintain future legacy codebases.

For names of large applications this is not as bad, and some of these applications become household names, but I think we should try to avoid this for general-purpose utilities.

The alternative is non-memorable names. I can't tell you how many android-async-image-loader libraries there are. It's a lot easier to remember 'Picasso'. It's also a lot easier for me to Google for 'Picasso Android' and get relevant results.

A better alternative is a combination of both, such as : [fancynoun-purpose]. For example: alamo-http

I think Mattt can get away with this as he has the most well known open source library for cocoa development.

I'm not a cocoa developer, and I don't really know who matt is, or what library that may be ;). Once I'm a seated cocoa developer I probably will though, but then my general point no longer really applies.

I feel this is a trend now with new projects, it's also the case in Node.js, Go and new Python packages.

This can go as absurd as the package named "a" in npm (https://www.npmjs.org/package/a) which is used by a lot other packages. I also had some trouble to figure out what each package is suppose to do when using RoR.

However, I would not say it's necessary easier in older languages when I see the amount of weird acronyms used in the Java world.

Ruby does this too. Thor, God, bluepill, and pony all come to mind.

I wonder how much this matters to other developers –

but I, at least subconsciously, when faced with a library choice, take into account things like:

- Simple, pretty name (Alamofire is very nice-sounding and memorable – even feels like overkill, author should've saved it for an iPhone app or something.)

- The pretty logo

- The perfect use of Markdown (I'm so obsessed about using `` around everything that looks like code it feels like a psychological condition)

- Clear structure of README

- Simple examples with syntax highlighting

There must be correlation between the presentation and quality of the source code!

> There must be correlation between the presentation and quality of the source code!

There isn't.

The overlap is relatively small between:

- People who are great at writing software.

- People who are great at designing logos and quality of presentation (or have someone on staff that is).

You make some good points, and I agree to caution against names that bear no semantic relationship with their purpose. My justification of Alamofire is that it reflects the history of the project, which traces back from AFNetworking to Gowalla (formerly Alamofire, Inc.), the product for which it was originally developed.

Ah I didn't realize the link to the AF in AFNetworking.

For what it's worth, I do love how the name sounds :)

Thanks for all your work! Been using AFNetworking for years and Alamofire looks great.

So... what do those guys at Panic have you working on? ;)

Thanks for your great works! I am using Alamofire on my project right now. Do Alamofire support or will support async image loading via URL just like AFNetworking? I can't find the API anywhere on the docs.

Are all of Alamofire/PackRat/Gowalla defunct now?

I wondered this too.

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