RestKit is an Objective-C framework for iOS that aims to make interacting with RESTful web services simple, fast and fun. It combines a clean, simple HTTP request/response API with a powerful object mapping system that reduces the amount of code you need to write to get stuff done.
A simple, high level HTTP request / response system.
RestKit ships with an HTTP client built on top of NSURLConnection and provides a library of helpful methods for inspecting MIME types and status codes. Submitting form data is as simple as providing a dictionary of parameters and a native params object is included for easily creating multi-part submissions.
Core Data support.
Building on top of the object mapping layer, RestKit provides integration with Apple’s Core Data framework. This support allows RestKit to persist remotely loaded objects directly back into a local store, either as a fast local cache or a primary data store that is periodically synced with the cloud. RestKit can populate Core Data associations for you, allowing natural property based traversal of your data model. It also provides a nice API on top of the Core Data primitives that simplifies configuration and querying use cases.
Database Seeding.
When the Core Data object store is used, you can seed a database from a collection of data files. This lets you submit your apps to the App Store with a database in the app bundle that is ready for immediate use.
Framework level support for switching servers & environments (development/production/staging).
RestKit uses a base URL and resource paths rather than full URL’s to allow you to switch target servers quickly. Interpolating URL strings and constructing NSURL objects is a thing of the past.
An object mapping system.
RestKit provides a modeling layer for mapping processed data payloads into native Cocoa objects declaratively. This lets the application programmer stop worrying about parsing and simply ask the framework to asynchronously fetch a remote resource and call the delegate with the results. Object mapping is implemented using key-value coding, allowing for quick traversal of the parsed object graph. Reflection is used on the property types to allow for mapping from remote dates encoded as a string back to NSDate objects.
Pluggable parsing layer.
RestKit currently supports JSON via the SBJSON and YAJL parsers. Parsing is implemented behind a simple interface to allow additional data formats to be handled transparently.
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