Book Image

Swift 4 Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Swift 4 Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Swift 4 is an exciting, multi-platform, general-purpose programming language. Being open source, modern and easy to use has made Swift one of the fastest growing programming languages. If you interested in exploring it, then this book is what you need. The book begins with an introduction to the basic building blocks of Swift 4, its syntax and the functionalities of Swift constructs. Then, introduces you to Apple's Xcode 9 IDE and Swift Playgrounds, which provide an ideal platform to write, execute, and debug the codes thus initiating your development process. Next, you'll learn to bundle variables into tuples, set order to your data with an array, store key-value pairs with dictionaries and you'll learn how to use the property observers. Later, explore the decision-making and control structures in Swift and learn how to handle errors in Swift 4. Then you'll, examine the advanced features of Swift, generics and operators, and then explore the functionalities outside of the standard library, provided by frameworks such as Foundation and UIKit. Also, you'll explore advanced features of Swift Playgrounds. At the end of the book, you'll learn server-side programming aspect of Swift 4 and see how to run Swift on Linux and then investigate Vapor, one of the most popular server-side frameworks for Swift.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Networking

Every app worth building will need to send or receive information from the internet at some point and therefore networking support is a critical part of any development platform. In Swift, this support for networking is provided by the Foundation framework.

When we need to retrieve information from the internet, we send out a request to a server on the internet, and that server sends a response that hopefully contains the information we requested.

The main networking components that Foundation provides are as listed:

  • URL: The address of a resource on a remote server. It contains information about the server and where the resource can be found on the server.
  • URLRequest: Represents the request that will be made to the remote server. Defines the URL of the resource, how the request should be sent, metadata in the form of headers, and data that should be sent with it.
  • ...