been wrestling with this for some time. I am trying to access a REST api on my iphone and came across the ASIHTTP framework that would assist me. So i did something like
I have a couple of apps using a framework called Objective Resource which provides a wrapper for accessing remote REST based api's. It is aimed primarily at Ruby on Rails based applications so it's XML/JSON parsing may be tuned to handle some Rails defaults but it is worth looking at. It supports http basic authentication by default.