You're a smart developer. You probably use Alamofire to abstract away access to NSURLSession and all those nasty details you don't really care about. But then, like lots of smart developers, you write ad hoc network abstraction layers. They are probably called "APIManager" or "NetworkModel", and probably look something like this.
It's leaky, meaning your app touches Alamofire directly and your layer bypasses Alamofire to access the network directly sometimes.
This kind of ad hoc network layer is common in iOS apps. It's bad for a few reasons:
- It makes it hard to write new apps ("where do I begin?")
- It makes it hard to maintain existing apps ("oh my god, this mess...")
- It makes it hard to write unit tests ("how do I do this again?")
So the basic idea is that we want some network abstraction layer that sufficiently encapsulates actually calling Alamofire directly. It should be simple enough that common things are easy, but comprehensive enough that complicated things are also easy.
Basically:
If you use Alamofire to abstract away
NSURLSession, why not use something to abstract away the nitty gritty of URLs, parameters, etc?
Some awesome features of Moya:
- Compile-time checking for correct API endpoint accesses.
- Lets you define a clear usage of different endpoints with associated enum values.
- Keeps track of inflight requests with ReactiveCocoa and prevents duplicate requests.
- Treats test stubs as first-class citizens so unit testing is super-easy.
There's a sample project in the Demo directory. Go nuts!
This project has hit a 1.0 release, and we're using it in Artsy's new auction app. We consider it ready for production use.
Currently, we support Xcode 6.3.1 and Swift 1.2.
Just add pod 'Moya' to your Podfile and go!
In any file you'd like to use Moya in, don't forget to
import the framework with import Moya.
For reactive extensions, this project has some dependencies. Add the following lines to your Podfile:
pod 'Moya'
# Include the following only if you want to use ReactiveCocoa extensions with Moya
pod 'ReactiveCocoa', '3.0-beta.6'
pod 'Moya/Reactive'Then run pod install.
After some setup, using Moya is really simple. You can access an API like this:
provider.request(.Zen) { (data, statusCode, response, error) in
if let data = data {
// do something with the data
}
}That's a basic example. Many API requests need parameters. Moya encodes these into the enum you use to access the endpoint, like this:
provider.request(.UserProfile("ashfurrow")) { (data, statusCode, response, error) in
if let data = data {
// do something with the data
}
}No more typos in URLs. No more missing parameter values. No more messing with parameter encoding.
For more examples, see the documentation.
Even cooler are the ReactiveCocoa extensions. It immediately returns a
RACSignal that you can subscribe to or bind or map or whatever you want to
do. To handle errors, for instance, we could do the following:
provider.request(.UserProfile("ashfurrow")).subscribeNext { (object) -> Void in
image = UIImage(data: object as? NSData)
}, error: { (error) -> Void in
println(error)
}In addition to the option of using signals instead of callback blocks, there are
also a series of signal operators that will attempt to map the data received
from the network response into either an image, some JSON, or a string, with
mapImage(), mapJSON(), and mapString(), respectively. If the mapping is
unsuccessful, you'll get an error on the signal. You also get handy methods for
filtering out certain status codes. This means that you can place your code for
handling API errors like 400's in the same places as code for handling invalid
responses.
Hey! Like Moya? Awesome! We could actually really use your help!
Open source isn't just writing code. Moya could use your help with any of the following:
- Finding (and reporting!) bugs.
- New feature suggestions.
- Answering questions on issues.
- Documentation improvements.
- Reviewing pull requests.
- Helping to manage issue priorities.
- Fixing bugs/new features.
If any of that sounds cool to you, send a pull request! After a few contributions, we'll add you as admins to the repo so you can merge pull requests 🎉
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
Moya is released under an MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.