Skip to Content
Swift Development with Cocoa
book

Swift Development with Cocoa

by Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jonathon Manning, Tim Nugent
December 2014
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
11h 31m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Swift Development with Cocoa

Chapter 14. Networking

Many chapters in books like this begin with something like, “The ability to talk to computers over the network is an increasingly popular feature.” We won’t bore you with that. Suffice to say—it’s the 21st century, networking is huge, and your app needs to send and receive data. Let’s learn how.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to make connections over the network and access resources with URLs. You’ll also learn how to use Bonjour to discover nearby network services so that you can connect to them. Finally, you’ll learn how to create your own network service and receive connections from other devices.

All of the content in this chapter applies to both OS X and iOS.

Connections

At the lowest level, network connections in Cocoa are the same as in every other popular OS. The Berkeley sockets API, the fundamental networking and connectivity API used on Windows and Unix OSes (which includes OS X and iOS), is available, allowing you to make connections to any computer on the network and send and receive data.

However, working with such a low-level API can be cumbersome, especially when you want to use popular, higher level protocols like HTTP. To make things more fun for developers like us, Cocoa provides a higher level API that provides a simple interface for accessing content via URLs on the Internet.

Note

A URL is a uniform resource locator. It’s a location on the Internet, and specifies the location of the server to connect to, the protocol to use, and the location ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

iOS Development with Swift

iOS Development with Swift

Craig Grummitt
Core Data in Swift

Core Data in Swift

Marcus S. Zarra

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491909683Errata