休息，杰森，Alamofire-迅捷

Question

I have really huge problem with these 3. I can't them distinct. I know that are libraries and cooperate with themselves . It seems to me that all three make the same , I mean retrieve data from Internet. Could you explain me what's going on with these three?

Answer 1

REST(Representational state transfer): It is a framework which provides you a way of communicating between computers using internet. Typically, over an API call. It consists of an Architecture with 6 Constraints (5 Compulsory & 1 Optional). Read more about it here .

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation): This is a standard representation of data exchange. There are other representations like XML which were used for the same. JSON consists of basic data structures in order to pass data over network. It uses String, Number, Array, another JSON Object, null and a Boolean to efficiently represent data.

The above 2 concepts are relevant in any stream or language of computer science.

Alamofire(HTTP Networking library for Swift): This library IS ONLY USED IN iOS APPS WITH SWIFT. It doesn't hold relevance outside this subset. Sure, there is a method of making network calls without using Alamofire in swift. You can read about NSURL, NSURLSession etc. to learn the classic method. The problem with normal NSURL calls is that it is very elaborate to write those calls and can get messy in no time. Thankfully, there is a way of mitigating that mess. Alamofire handles those async calls efficiently and also lets you do cool stuff with the response easily.

NOTE: These 3 are not at all same. REST calls can be made using JSON, XML, URL Encoding etc. JSON can be used in normal JavaScript and not necessarily needs to be passed over a network. and Alamofire exists to just ease the pain of making network calls in iOS.

Hope this helps!