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Introduction to CFNetwork Programming Guide

Contents:

Organization of This Document
See Also

CFNetwork is a framework in the Core Services framework that provides a library of abstractions for network protocols. These abstractions make it easy to perform a variety of network tasks, such as:

• Working with BSD sockets

• Creating encrypted connections using SSL or TLS

• Resolving DNS hosts

• Working with HTTP, authenticating HTTP and HTTPS servers

• Working with FTP servers

• Publishing, resolving and browsing Bonjour services

This book is intended for developers who want to use network protocols in their applications. In order to fully understand this book, the reader should have a good understanding of network programming concepts such as BSD sockets, streams and HTTP protocols. Additionally, the reader should be familiar Mac OS X programming concepts including run loops. For more information about Mac OS X please read Mac OS X Technology Overview.

Organization of This Document

This book contains the following chapters:

• “CFNetwork Concepts” describes each of the CFNetwork APIs and how they interact.

• “Working with Streams” describes how to use the CFStream API to send and receive network data.

• “Communicating with HTTP Servers” describes how to send and receive HTTP messages.

• “Communicating with Authenticating HTTP Servers” describes how to communicate with secure HTTP servers.

• “Working with FTP Servers” describes how to upload and download files from an FTP server, and how to download directory listings.

• “Using Network Diagnostics” describes how to add network diagnostics to your application.

See Also

For more information about the networking APIs in Mac OS X, read:

• Getting Started with Networking

Refer to the following reference documents for CFNetwork:

• CFFTPStream Reference is the reference documentation for the CFFTPStream API.

• CFHTTPMessage Reference is the reference documentation for the CFHTTPMessage API.

• CFHTTPStream Reference is the reference documentation for the CFHTTPStream API.

• CFHTTPAuthentication Reference is the reference documentation for the CFHTTPAuthentication API.

• CFHost Reference is the reference documentation for the CFHost API.

• CFNetServices Reference is the reference documentation for the CFNetServices API.

• CFNetDiagnostics Reference is the reference documentation for the CFNetDiagnostics API.

In addition to the documentation provided by Apple, the following is the reference book for socket-level programming:

• UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1 (Stevens, Fenner and Rudoff)

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