Once upon a time, Cocoa's networking offering wasn't that amazing. It was complicated, it didn't offer a lot of what was needed (without some serious background knowledge), and it even encouraged some poor programming practices by making the right way the hard way. Those were the days before NSURLSession.
Into this rather bleak landscape marched a few intrepid developers who released Objective C frameworks that filled this gap. There were several worthy candidates, many of whom built upon experience gained by their predecessors. Most successful was Scott Raymond and Mattt Thompson's AFNetworking framework. Almost everybody used it, it became a de facto standard.
The release of NSURLSession made the case for using third-party code like AFNetworking less clear. The new Apple framework had adopted much of what had been developed by third-party developers, and was a better...
