I've had significant success with NSURL, NSURL[Mutable]Request, NSURLConnection with my iPhone applications. When trying to compile a stand alone Cocoa application, 10 line program to make a simple HTTP request, there are zero compiler errors or warnings. The program compiles fine, yet the HTTP Request is never made to my web server (I'm running a tcpdump and watching Apache logs in parallel). When I run very similar code in an iPhone app, essentially copy/pasted as evil as that is, all works golden. I've had significant success with NSURL, NSURL[