"Web responses are volatile. Servers go down, API's change, responses change and every time something changes, your tests should fail. Mocking out web responses may speed up your test suite but the tests essentially become lies. Ephemeral Response encourages you to run your tests against real web services while keeping your test suite snappy by caching the responses and reusing them until they expire."

"ASIHTTPRequest is an easy to use wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is written in Objective-C and works in both Mac OS X and iPhone applications."

has example of restricting a route for only certain http verbs

Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance.