Best architectural approaches for building iOS networking applications (REST clients)

Question

I\'m an iOS developer with some experience and this question is really interesting to me. I saw a lot of different resources and materials on this topic, but nevertheless I\

Answer 1

I use the approach that I've gotten from here: https://github.com/Constantine-Fry/Foursquare-API-v2. I've rewritten that library in Swift and you can see the architectural approach from these parts of the code:

typealias OpertaionCallback = (success: Bool, result: AnyObject?) -> ()

class Foursquare{
    var authorizationCallback: OperationCallback?
    var operationQueue: NSOperationQueue
    var callbackQueue: dispatch_queue_t?

    init(){
        operationQueue = NSOperationQueue()
        operationQueue.maxConcurrentOperationCount = 7;
        callbackQueue = dispatch_get_main_queue();
    }

    func checkIn(venueID: String, shout: String, callback: OperationCallback) -> NSOperation {
        let parameters: Dictionary  = [
            "venueId":venueID,
            "shout":shout,
            "broadcast":"public"]
        return self.sendRequest("checkins/add", parameters: parameters, httpMethod: "POST", callback: callback)
    }

    func sendRequest(path: String, parameters: Dictionary , httpMethod: String, callback:OperationCallback) -> NSOperation{
        let url = self.constructURL(path, parameters: parameters)
        var request = NSMutableURLRequest(URL: url)
        request.HTTPMethod = httpMethod
        let operation = Operation(request: request, callbackBlock: callback, callbackQueue: self.callbackQueue!)
        self.operationQueue.addOperation(operation)
        return operation
    }

    func constructURL(path: String, parameters: Dictionary ) -> NSURL {
        var parametersString = kFSBaseURL+path
        var firstItem = true
        for key in parameters.keys {
            let string = parameters[key]
            let mark = (firstItem ? "?" : "&")
            parametersString += "\(mark)\(key)=\(string)"
            firstItem = false
        }
    return NSURL(string: parametersString.stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding))
    }
}

class Operation: NSOperation {
    var callbackBlock: OpertaionCallback
    var request: NSURLRequest
    var callbackQueue: dispatch_queue_t

    init(request: NSURLRequest, callbackBlock: OpertaionCallback, callbackQueue: dispatch_queue_t) {
        self.request = request
        self.callbackBlock = callbackBlock
        self.callbackQueue = callbackQueue
    }

    override func main() {
        var error: NSError?
        var result: AnyObject?
        var response: NSURLResponse?

        var recievedData: NSData? = NSURLConnection.sendSynchronousRequest(self.request, returningResponse: &response, error: &error)

        if self.cancelled {return}

        if recievedData{
            result = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(recievedData, options: nil, error: &error)
            if result != nil {
                if result!.isKindOfClass(NSClassFromString("NSError")){
                    error = result as? NSError
            }
        }

        if self.cancelled {return}

        dispatch_async(self.callbackQueue, {
            if (error) {
                self.callbackBlock(success: false, result: error!);
            } else {
                self.callbackBlock(success: true, result: result!);
            }
            })
    }

    override var concurrent:Bool {get {return true}}
}

Basically, there is NSOperation subclass that makes the NSURLRequest, parses JSON response and adds the callback block with the result to the queue. The main API class constructs NSURLRequest, initialises that NSOperation subclass and adds it to the queue.