NSOperation, NSURLConnection, and NSRunLoop on iPhone

When using an NSOperation with an NSURLConnection performing asynchronously, this blog post indicates that one must add a connection port (an empty NSPort object) to the current run loop in order to keep the thread alive during the “polling” process using the NSRunLoop during the execution of the start message on the subclassed NSOperation.

Handling Credentials

This forum post talks about how to integrate the use of credentials using an NSOperation and NSURLConnection. These two articles are important to be taken together, because in order to respond to authentication challenges from a server (e.g., basic authentication challenge from a REST web service), the only way to do it is with asynchronous networking, because that is the only way a delegate is used in the connection process.