[Adam Robinson]

Does the Foundation or AppKit include classes for TCP/IP communication, or would this be something someone would be interested in? If it doesn't include them, I'll probably end up writing a framework that implements it.

[AirSluf]

[Angus_D]

There is something in CoreFoundation called CFSocket, but there is very little documentation on it and it conforms to the methaphors of CF not of Obj-C/Cocoa. There is an Obj-C wrapper for BSD sockets called SmallSockets and is available at http://smallsockets.sourceforge.net/

[lindberg]

There isn't too much in the way of (public) networking classes in Cocoa unfortunately. NSURL can retrieve the contents for file:// or http[s]:// URLs, and NSFileHandle can be initialized with a TCP socket's file descriptor, meaning you can use NSFileHandle methods to read/write/be notified etc. The Message framework has one header which provides an easy API for sending email (i.e. SMTP). Past that there's not much in the kits.

If you're writing Java/Cocoa you obviously have all the Java networking APIs available. Even if you're primarily in Objective-C, there's nothing stopping you from writing one particular piece in Java so you can use Java networking, and messaging that one piece from ObjC across the bridge.

There are several third-party packages out there, as mentioned. The Omni frameworks are involved but offer a lot of stuff, whereas smallsockets (probably; I've never used it) gives you a lightweight API to TCP sockets.
EDInternet is probably somewhere in the middle, offering a handful of classes for different socket types that can be used as a basis for implementing higher level protocols (I think the author used them as part of an NNTP implementation). There is also
CURLHandle, which (according to its documentation) is a wrapper around libcurl in the form of an NSURLHandle subclass that can handle lots more types of URLs and provides for things like fetching in a background thread.

[wadesworld]

There's a implementation out there called SmallSockets - it's a Obj-C implementation of sockets.

Keep in mind that you can also just use C code to call the BSD sockets API.

Wade

[sordid]

Personally I find using the C code just as easy for simple things. But there is absolutely no documentation on CFSocket I can find anywhere! No examples either!

[amonitzer]

Originally posted by sordid:
<STRONG>Personally I find using the C code just as easy for simple things. But there is absolutely no documentation on CFSocket I can find anywhere! No examples either!</STRONG>

Read the header file CFSocket.h, it's pretty well documented. CFSocket is just a CF-wrapper around BSD sockets.
I usually just create a regular socket and use CFSocketCreateWithNative to convert it into a CFSocket for inserting into the current CFRunLoop (for getting a callback when new data arrives).

I've written an article that covers it roughly (including a CFSocket example!) which is available at cocoadevcentral.

[sordid]

Originally posted by amonitzer:
<STRONG>

Read the header file CFSocket.h, it's pretty well documented. CFSocket is just a CF-wrapper around BSD sockets.
I usually just create a regular socket and use CFSocketCreateWithNative to convert it into a CFSocket for inserting into the current CFRunLoop (for getting a callback when new data arrives).

I've written an article that covers it roughly (including a CFSocket example!) which is available at cocoadevcentral.</STRONG>

Thanks for the tips.. they have been very helpful.