Web Request & Parsing

Alamofire Library

For iOS and MacOS, web requests and responses are handled using the HTTP network-based library Alamofire. It offers an interface at the top of Apple’s networking stack and is the wrapper class for URLSession. Common networking operations, such as preparing HTTP requests and parsing JSON objects, are made simpler by it.

Alamofire’s primary benefit is that it is entirely built in Swift and does not take any code from the AFNetworking library, which is utilized by objective C for networking calls.

Along with many other capabilities, it offers JSON parameter and response serialization, request and response methods, authentication, and much more. Because Alamofire makes HTTP networking calls in iOS projects simpler. We were accustomed to preparing every request on our own before Alamofire. The difficult procedure of uploading and downloading files was also involved in the multipart request and response.

We will go over how to utilize and operate the popular networking library Alamofire in this section of the course. We’re going to build up a project and explore what we can do with Alamofire.

Setting up Alamofire in the iOS project

Alamofire may be added to the project by using Carthage or Cocoapods. We’ll stick with cocoapods for the installation because we utilized them in this guide. We can locate the installation documentation for the Alamofire project on GitHub at https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire.

But first, let’s make a new project called AlamoDemo just for network calls. Here, we are storing it on the desktop in a folder called Alamofire.

Once the project has been created, launch the terminal and use the following command to change the directory to the project directory.

				
					$ cd Desktop/Alamofire/AlamoDemo

Use this command to set the Podfile’s initialization.

				
					$ pod init

To install the Alamofire pods, add the following line to the Podfile.

				
					pod 'Alamofire'

After the pods have been successfully installed, open the project xcworkspace file by running the following command.

				
					$ pod install

Basic network terminologies

The fundamental network terms that we will be using in this area of the lesson, such as HTTP, JSON, and REST APIs, have not yet been covered in this tutorial. Nonetheless, you will gain some exposure to standard network terms from this.

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP for short, is an application protocol or set of guidelines. It regulates the transmission of data across the internet. Every website uses the set of guidelines provided by HTTP to move data from the webserver to the client’s web browser. On the internet, HTTP or HTTPS comes before every URL. Additional application protocols include SSH, Telnet, and FTP. The client uses one of the following request methods that are defined by HTTP to specify the activity.

GET: To get data out of the database, send a GET request. The data on the server is not changed by it.
POST: In order to execute an update action, it is used to communicate the data to the server.
HEAD: It is the same as a GET request. But it transmits the headers only, not the data itself.
PUT: It is employed to transfer the data to a designated web server location.
DELETE: It is employed to remove data from a designated area.

REST

The acronym REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer, which outlines a set of guidelines for creating dependable and user-friendly Web APIs. It outlines a few architecture guidelines that maintain the requests’ states throughout web requests, enabling caching and consistent access. When integrating REST APIs into an application, developers do not have to keep track of the data’s status across requests.

JSON

The acronym for JavaScript Object Notation is JSON. It offers a method for transferring data between two systems that is legible by humans. To put it simply, the data is sent by the REST APIs in JSON format, which the client must parse. Numerous data kinds, including string, Boolean, number, array, object, and null, are available in JSON.

Our primary responsibility as application developers is to parse the JSON data that the server sends through the API. Our memory-based objects must be converted to JSON and vice versa. We can utilize the JSONSerialization, JSONEncoder, and JSONDecoder classes for this purpose. But, in order to handle JSON, we may also make use of several third-party libraries, such as SwityJSON.

An ideal combo for providing us with online services is HTTP, REST, and JSON together. However, utilizing these services is made simple with the Alamofire library. But in the following portion of this tutorial, we will talk about utilizing Alamofire to handle the data through the get request now that it is setup in the iOS project.

Alamofire Library