Would it be good to do the parsing to JSON from NSData directly?

[T-Pham]

So, instead of letting Alamofire parse the data to AnyObject and then this extension convert the AnyObject to JSON, is it better to just parse the data to JSON right away?

You can find one possible implementation here:
https://gist.github.com/T-Pham/3df34ab571ac244666f12744a31eda76