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

XML and JSON


It was not that long ago that most consumer-based applications were self-contained and did not need to exchange data with external services. However, in today's age of smartphones and data-driven applications, it is now rare to develop applications that do not need to exchange data with external services. This makes it essential for application developers to know how to exchange data in standard formats.

These days, API designers tend to favor one of the two formats to exchange data—XML or JSON. There have been a number of other data exchange formats that have been promoted over the years, but XML and JSON are, by far, the current leaders. The primary reason for this is that the openness and interoperability of XML and JSON are unmatched by the other data exchange formats. It would be hard to find a public web API that does not offer XML and/or JSON to exchange data.

Apple has provided simple and efficient APIs to work with both XML and JSON data. While there are a number of third...