CFNetwork简介

CFNetwork Concepts

CFNetwork is a low-level, high-performance framework that gives you the ability to have detailed control over the protocol stack. It is an extension to BSD sockets, the standard socket abstraction API that provides objects to simplify tasks such as communicating with FTP and HTTP servers or resolving DNS hosts. CFNetwork is based, both physically and theoretically, on BSD sockets.

Just as CFNetwork relies on BSD sockets, there are a number of Cocoa classes that rely on CFNetwork (NSURL, for example). In addition, the Web Kit is a set of Cocoa classes to display web content in windows. Both of these classes are very high level and implement most of the details of the networking protocols by themselves. Thus, the structure of the software layers looks like the image in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1  CFNetwork and other software layers on OS X

When to Use CFNetwork

CFNetwork has a number of advantages over BSD sockets. It provides run-loop integration, so if your application is run loop based you can use network protocols without implementing threads. CFNetwork also contains a number of objects to help you use network protocols without having to implement the details yourself. For example, you can use FTP protocols without having to implement all of the details with the CFFTP API. If you understand the networking protocols and need the low-level control they provide but don't want to implement them yourself, then CFNetwork is probably the right choice.

There are a number of advantages of using CFNetwork instead of Foundation-level networking APIs. CFNetwork is focused more on the network protocols, whereas the Foundation-level APIs are focused more on data access, such as transferring data over HTTP or FTP. Although Foundation APIs do provide some configurability, CFNetwork provides a lot more. For more information on Foundation networking classes, read URL Loading System Programming Guide.

Now that you understand how CFNetwork interacts with the other OS X networking APIs, you're ready to become familiar with the CFNetwork APIs along with two APIs that form the infrastructure for CFNetwork.

CFNetwork Infrastructure

Before learning about the CFNetwork APIs, you must first understand the APIs which are the foundation for the majority of CFNetwork. CFNetwork relies on two APIs that are part of the Core Foundation framework, CFSocket and CFStream. Understanding these APIs is essential to using CFNetwork.

CFSocket API

Sockets are the most basic level of network communications. A socket acts in a similar manner to a telephone jack. It allows you to connect to another socket (either locally or over a network) and send data to that socket.

The most common socket abstraction is BSD sockets. CFSocket is an abstraction for BSD sockets. With very little overhead, CFSocket provides almost all the functionality of BSD sockets, and it integrates the socket into a run loop. CFSocket is not limited to stream-based sockets (for example, TCP), it can handle any type of socket.

You could create a CFSocket object from scratch using the CFSocketCreate function, or from a BSD socket using the CFSo