Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By : Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento
Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By: Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento

Overview of this book

macOS continues to lead the way in desktop operating systems, with its tight integration across the Apple ecosystem of platforms and devices. With this book, you will get an in-depth knowledge of working on macOS, enabling you to unleash the full potential of the latest version using Swift 3 to build applications. This book will help you broaden your horizons by taking your programming skills to next level. The initial chapters will show you all about the environment that surrounds a developer at the start of a project. It introduces you to the new features that Swift 3 and Xcode 8 offers and also covers the common design patterns that you need to know for planning anything more than trivial projects. You will then learn the advanced Swift programming concepts, including memory management, generics, protocol orientated and functional programming and with this knowledge you will be able to tackle the next several chapters that deal with Apple’s own Cocoa frameworks. It also covers AppKit, Foundation, and Core Data in detail which is a part of the Cocoa umbrella framework. The rest of the book will cover the challenges posed by asynchronous programming, error handling, debugging, and many other areas that are an indispensable part of producing software in a professional environment. By the end of this book, you will be well acquainted with Swift, Cocoa, and AppKit, as well as a plethora of other essential tools, and you will be ready to tackle much more complex and advanced software projects.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
18
LLDB and the Command Line

Patterns for downloading data


We have two broad patterns that we can use with the URLSession framework. One is very simple and will suffice for many situations, and the other requires a fair amount of additional coding, but offers us a much greater degree of control and flexibility.

Both patterns deal with asynchronous requests that will not block further execution of your code. Synchronous requests are not covered in this chapter, and you will quite possibly never need them.

Simplicity

The simplest set of calls to URLSession will involve passing a closure to whichever method we are calling. That closure must simply accept the correct arguments from the system when it gets called back. Once the download is complete, this closure will be populated with a response, some data, and an error, any of which may be nil. Any code you need to run once the download finishes will go in this closure.

Control

A more complicated pattern, but one which affords us a higher level of control that we are likely...