Frequently Asked Questions - HTTP Library

Mesibo HTTP library is a light, super-fast cross-platform HTTP library that makes networking easier and portable across platforms as you will see from the examples below. It supports everything you need - sending REST API requests, uploads, downloads with resume, managing cache, and images, keep-alive etc. Moreover, it’s not just faster than other libraries, it’s blazingly fast!

Mesibo HTTP library is an extension of Mesibo real-time Client APIs. The complete documentation of HTTP library is available here.

Valid question! In fact, we were using Volley for our Android development and AFNetworking for iOS development before we decided to use our own library. While those are good libraries, one of the fundamental issues is that they are only available for one platform. So not only do you need to learn two different libraries but also maintain two completely different codebases. Although unrelated, another issue we found with AFNetworking is that it is unreasonably bloated both in size and performance and complicated to use.

In contrast, Mesibo HTTP is a fresh approach. It’s a result of our experience using other libraries and limitations we met there. It’s quite evident from two examples below that how simple, powerful and portable Mesibo HTTP library is compared to other libraries.

Android File Upload Example

  Mesibo.Http http = new Mesibo.Http();
  http.url = "https://example.com";
  http.postBundle = post;
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  http.execute();

iOS File Upload Example

  MesiboHttp *http = [MesiboHttp new];
  http.url = @"https://example.com";
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  http.postBundle = post;
  [http execute];

Finally, Mesibo HTTP core is written in C/C++ and highly optimized. This makes it much faster, compact and less resource intensive compared to libraries written in Java.

Invoking REST API is as easy as creating as an http object, adding parameters to Bundle(Android) or NSDictionary(iOS) and invoke execute function of http object. Mesibo HTTP library takes care of URL encoding, etc.

Android Example

  Mesibo.init(content); //one time initialization

  // populate a Bundle with all the post parameters
  Bundle post = new Bundle();
  post.putString("name", "John");
  post.putInt("age", 30);
  post.putString("token", "some token");

  Mesibo.Http http = new Mesibo.Http();
  http.url = "https://example.com";
  http.postBundle = post;
  http.execute();

iOS Example

  NSMutableDictionary *post = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
    
  [post setValue:@"John" forKey:@"name"];
  [post setValue:[@(30) stringValue] forKey:@"age"];
  [post setValue:token forKey:@"token"];

  MesiboHttp *http = [MesiboHttp new];
  http.url = @"https://example.com";
  http.postBundle = post;
  [http execute];

Same as above, just pass file path to the http object and execute.

Android File Upload Example

  Mesibo.Http http = new Mesibo.Http();
  http.url = "https://example.com";
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  http.execute();

iOS File Upload Example

  MesiboHttp *http = [MesiboHttp new];
  http.url = @"https://example.com";
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  [http execute];

Absolutely, just add postBundle in addition to uploadFile. Internally, it will be converted into multipart form-data when both uploadFile and postBundle data is present.

Android File Upload with POST data Example

  Mesibo.Http http = new Mesibo.Http();
  http.url = "https://example.com";
  http.postBundle = post;
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  http.execute();

iOS File Upload with POST data Example

  MesiboHttp *http = [MesiboHttp new];
  http.url = @"https://example.com";
  http.uploadFile = filePath;
  http.postBundle = post;
  [http execute];

Same as above, just pass URL and file save path to the http object and execute.

Android File Download Example

  Mesibo.Http http = new Mesibo.Http();
  http.url = "https://example.com";
  http.downloadFile = filePath;
  http.resume = true;
  http.execute();

iOS File Download Example

  MesiboHttp *http = [MesiboHttp new];
  http.url = @"https://example.com";
  http.downloadFile = filePath;
  http.resume = YES;
  [http execute];

Both Android and iOS platforms make it super easy to decode JSON data.

Android Example String data = http.getDataString(); try { Response resp = mGson.fromJson(data, Response.class); } catch (Exception e) {}

Complete Code on GitHub

iOS Example NSError *jsonerror = nil;

NSData *data = [[http getDataString] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
id jsonObject = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data 
                           options:NSJSONReadingAllowFragments error:&jsonerror];

Complete Code on GitHub

Absolutely, in fact, HTTP library can let you control timeout at various states; timeout to connect, timeout to receive headers, timeout to receive the body, as shown below.

http.connectionTimeout = 15000; // 15 seconds
http.headerTimeout = 10000; // 10 seconds
http.bodyTimeout = 10000; // 10 seconds for every chunk of body packet

Refer to HTTP Library documentation for all the options.

By default, the cache is enabled and the responses are cached adhering to standard and server response. Mesibo will not cache if the server has restricted response from being cached. It also re-validates the cached objects as recommended by the server in its cache-control response headers.

You can, however, override this default behavior per request using various caching options in HTTP object; for example, forced caching or forced reading from the cache without revalidating.

http.updateCacheForced = true; 

For more details, refer to Cache Control Fields section in HTTP Library documentation.