Book Image

Mastering Swift 2

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 2

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

<p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">At their Worldwide Developer’s conference (WWDC) in 2015, Apple announced Swift 2, a major update to the innovative programming language they first unveiled to the world the year before. Swift 2 features exciting enhancements to the original iteration of Swift, acting, as Apple put it themselves as “a successor to the C and Objective-C languages.” – This book demonstrates how to get the most from these new features, and gives you the skills and knowledge you need to develop dynamic iOS and OS X applications.<br /> </span></p> <p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">Learn how to harness the newest features of Swift 2 todevelop advanced applications on a wide range of platforms with this cutting-edge development guide. Exploring and demonstrating how to tackle advanced topics such as Objective-C interoperability, ARC, closures, and concurrency, you’ll develop your Swift expertise and become even more fluent in this vital and innovative language. With examples that demonstrate how to put the concepts into practice, and design patterns and best practices, you’ll be writing better iOS and OSX applications in with a new level of sophistication and control.</span></p>
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Mastering Swift 2
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Taking the First Steps with Swift
2
Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators
Index

Protocols as types


Even though no functionality is implemented in a protocol, they are still considered a full-fledged type in the Swift programming language and can be used like any other type. What this means is we can use protocols as a parameter type or a return type in a function. We can also use them as the type for variables, constants, and collections. Let's take a look at some examples. For these few examples, we will use the PersonProtocol protocol:

protocol PersonProtocol {
    var firstName: String {get set}
    var lastName: String {get set}
    var birthDate: NSDate {get set}
    var profession: String {get}
    
    init (firstName: String, lastName: String, birthDate: NSDate)
}

In this first example, we will see how we would use protocols as a parameter type or return type in functions, methods, or initializers:

  func updatePerson(person: PersonProtocol) -> PersonProtocol {
      // Code to update person goes here
      return person
   }

In this example, the updatePerson...