Kringle

Do you really need Alamofire? Are you going to use all of those features? Do you even know what they do? Do you just want to download some JSON and parse it into a contract and be done with it? That is what Kringle is for.

Kringle is my cat. It's also a small, opinionated networking framework. It was designed with simplicity in mind and is really just a thin abstraction around URLSession.

Features

• Promises. Uses Google's Promises framework to provides a sane way to manage completion handlers and asynchronous behavior in general
• JSON deserialization. JSON response data is deserialized into objects which adopt the Decodable protocol on a background queue. So, your app won't hang if your JSON dataset is large
• Automated cookie management. Cookies will be stored for any response that contains the Set-Cookie header with an expiration date in the future or without one at all. Likewise, cookies will be deleted for any response that contains the Set-Cookie with an expiration date in the past (see RFC-6265 section 4.1.2)

Design

So I said this is an opinionated framework. The interface to this framework is through NetworkClient. This class exposes only eight methods. Each method name coresponds to a HTTP method name. Thus far, only delete, get, post and put are supported. I left out the other ones, like patch, because no one actually uses them even if folks say they do.

These methods accept an Endpoint type and return a Promise<void> if no response is expected from the endpoint, or a Promise<T> where T is a Decodable. Promises were added purely to improve developer experience.

The Endpoint type is an enum. This was inspired by a Chris Eidhof post from years ago.

enum CatEndpoint {
    case cuddle
    case pet(catName: String)
    case feed(catName: String)
}

extension CatEndpoint: Endpoint {
    var baseURL: URL { return URL(string: "https://api.kringlekitty.com")! }
    var path: String {
        switch self {
        case .cuddle:
            return "/kittycuddles"
        case .pet(let catName):
            return "/pet/\(catName)/"
        case .feed(let catName):
            return "/feed/\(catName)/"
        }
    }
}

And here's how to invoke a GET request on that endpoint.

let cat = CatEndpoint.pet(catName: "Kringle")
networkClient = NetworkClient()

// This performs a GET request on https://api.kringlekitty.com/pet/Kringle
networkClient.get(cat).then { _ in
  print("🐱")
  }.catch { error in
    print("You gotta be kitten me!")
}

Development

This framework was created with Swift Package Manager. The easiest way to get started after cloning the repository is to run swift build to install all dependencies.