Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By : Giordano Scalzo
Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By: Giordano Scalzo

Overview of this book

Swift is no longer the unripe language it was when launched by Apple at WWDC14, now it’s a powerful and ready-for-production programming language that has empowered most new released apps. Swift is a user-friendly language with a smooth learning curve; it is safe, robust, and really flexible. Swift 2 is more powerful than ever; it introduces new ways to solve old problems, more robust error handling, and a new programming paradigm that favours composition over inheritance. Swift 2 by Example is a fast-paced, practical guide to help you learn how to develop iOS apps using Swift. Through the development of seven different iOS apps and one server app, you’ll find out how to use either the right feature of the language or the right tool to solve a given problem. We begin by introducing you to the latest features of Swift 2, further kick-starting your app development journey by building a guessing game app, followed by a memory game. It doesn’t end there, with a few more apps in store for you: a to-do list, a beautiful weather app, two games: Flappy Swift and Cube Runner, and finally an ecommerce app to top everything off. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build well-designed apps, effectively use AutoLayout, develop videogames, and build server apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Swift 2 By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Welcome to the World of Swift
2
Building a Guess the Number App
Index

Connecting to the server


Finally, we are ready to get the forecast data, and for that, we'll use a nice service called OpenWeatherMap, http://openweathermap.org, which offers a free tier as well.

To get access to the free tier, first of all we need to register to the site and then create a new API key, which will be passed as a parameter in every call to the server.

With this information, let's implement WeatherDatastore.

This class uses Alamofire, the Swift equivalent of AFNetworking, the most used third-party library to help handle network communications in iOS. It also uses SwiftyJson, which eliminates the problem of nested checks for optional values during the decoding of JSON (short for JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data interchange format) data:

import Foundation
import CoreLocation
import Alamofire
import SwiftyJSON

class WeatherDatastore {
    let APIKey = "CREATE_API_KEY"

    func retrieveCurrentWeatherAtLat(lat: CLLocationDegrees, lon: CLLocationDegrees,
        block...