Fetching data with URLSession

Every app worth building will need to send or receive information from the internet at some point, and therefore, networking support is a critical part of any development platform. In Swift, this support for networking is provided by the Foundation framework.

When we need to retrieve information from the internet, we send out a request to a server on the internet, and that server sends a response that hopefully contains the information we requested.

In this recipe, we will learn how to send network requests and receive a response using the Foundation framework.

Getting ready

It is helpful to know about the different components that Foundation provides that deal with networking and what they do:

• URL: The address of a resource on a remote server. It contains information about the server and where the resource can be found on the server.
• URLRequest: Represents the request that will be made to the remote server. Defines the URL of the...