Someday I Need to Take a Good Look at BLIP
I saw a tweet from Wil Shipley about problems with the socket communications, and I felt for him... it's not a lot of fun getting your socket library working with all the problems that can arise in networking code, and Gus Mueller tweeted that he needed to look at BLIP. So I took a little look-see and realized that for Mac OS X, it is probably something I need to look at deeper.
There are a ton of things to remember to make a socket library work well in all kinds of conditions. I've spent the better part of a year getting one written in C++ for both linux and solaris - where the differences are really more striking than you'd expect, and I know it's not easy. So I'm all for making use of something that's already there - assuming it's written well, and flexible enough to allow me to do what I want to do without having to sacrifice something in order to work with the library.
BLIP looks to be a pretty nice system. It's written in ObjC and meant to work with the Mac OS X frameworks. There are classes for listening and connecting, for sending and receiving packets of information... it looks pretty good. It appears to be designed for the primary activity being information request/response, and that's nice as it's a big chunk of what I do, but there's also the more interactive things (chat) and FTP, and such. All nice to have in a toolkit.
Like I said... I need to give it a second look.