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)

Building a REST API using Vapor

One of the main use cases for server-side Swift is for building REST APIs. Interacting with network data is a key function of almost any app, and until now that server-side component had to be built by someone else with the relevant server-side skills, or required an app developer to frequently switch between programming languages and development environments to build both the client-side, and the server-side code in the app.

Swift on the server opens the possibility for a developer to work on everything involved in the app, and move seamlessly between client-side and server-side.

Despite being in its infancy, there is already a vibrant community springing up around server-side Swift, with some impressive open source webserver frameworks from heavy hitters like IBM, in the form of their Kitura framework--http://www.kitura.io.

In this recipe, we...