iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook

Creating a data server

In the Creating an echo server recipe, we created a server that accepted incoming text and echoed it back to the client. That recipe demonstrated how to send and receive text through a socket connection. Now you may be asking yourself, how do I send and receive datafiles, such as images or PDF files, through a socket connection?

Sending and receiving data over a socket connection is really not that different from sending and receiving text. You go through all the same steps to set up your sockets for sending or receiving, but at the end you get NSData instead of a character array.

For this recipe, we will be using the same BSDSocketServer class that we used in the Creating an echo server recipe of this chapter, since we can ...