3 Useful Networking libraries for Swift
As you may already know Swift is a really modern and powerful language. However, many times we may face difficulties and / or problems during the development process, that Swift cannot handle properly all by herself. Actually most of the times it does but in the end of the day it may not achieve it in the most efficient way. And that’s the point where Swift libraries comes in.
Swift’s native tools and classes for network layer handling such as URLSession, HTTPURLResponse etc, have been better and better over the years. However, there are many libraries out there making things way easier for us when trying to get data from an API, load and cache an image from a remote source or check what calls our app is making live.
So here are my favorite 3 Networking libraries for Swift.
3. Nuke
As the GitHub readme file of the library mentions
Nuke provides a simple and efficient way to download and display images in your app.
But it actually does much more than that. Nuke offers great possibilities regarding image download and projection such as placeholder images to show in case of download failure, transitions with animations during image loading, basic image processing tools such as resizing, rounded corners, gaussian blur and of course caching.
So I believe it is a no-brainer when there is a need of loading an image from a remote source.
Nuke has 5.7K stars on GitHub and it is available through Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods and Carthage.
2. Alamofire
I am sure that most of you already know (and may also use) Alamofire but I cannot write an article about Swift networking libraries without mentioning it. Alamofire is a networking library for Swift that provides an elegant interface on top of Swift’s native tools we mentioned in the description. Thus, it simplifies a lot all the common networking tasks that a Swift application may need.
Alamofire has 35.2K stars on GitHub and it is available through Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods and Carthage.
1. Netfox
It is probably the least famous library mentioned in this article but it is my favourite.
As the GitHub README file of the library mentions,
Netfox provides a quick look on all executed network requests performed by your iOS or OSX app. It grabs all requests — of course yours, requests from 3rd party libraries (such as AFNetworking, Alamofire or else), UIWebViews, and more.
So, it is extremely helpful while debugging network related issues.
Netfox has 3K stars on GitHub and it is available through CocoaPods and Carthage.
That’s all folks!
I hope you enjoyed!
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