In this recipe we will be creating a subclass of MKNetworkEngine; this creates an iTunes engine to perform a search using the iTunes Web API. While it is not necessary to create a subclass of MKNetworkEngine for each host that you are connecting to, it is recommended.
There are three main advantages to subclassing MKNetworkEngine. They are as follows:
Each subclass of
MKNetworkEnginecontains its ownReachabilityobject. ThisReachabilityobject will notify our class if there are changes in its availability or how we connect to the server.Each subclass also contains its own set of queues for
MKNetworkOperation.You can customize an engine to the needs of a specific server.
For best practice, we want to set up a separate MKNetworkEngine subclass for each host that we connect to. As an example, if our application was connecting to Yahoo and iTunes, we would want to have two MKNetworkEngine subclasses; one for Yahoo and one for iTunes. We can set up our...