Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By : Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By: Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone

Overview of this book

Swift keeps gaining traction not only amongst Apple developers but also as a server-side language. This book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. You’ll begin with a quick refresher on Swift, the compiler, the standard library, and the foundation, followed by the Cocoa design patterns – the ones at the core of many cocoa libraries – to follow up with the creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as defined by the GoF. You'll get acquainted with application architecture, as well as the most popular architectural design patterns, such as MVC and MVVM, and learn to use them in the context of Swift. In addition, you’ll walk through dependency injection and functional reactive programming. Special emphasis will be given to techniques to handle concurrency, including callbacks, futures and promises, and reactive programming. These techniques will help you adopt a test-driven approach to your workflow in order to use Swift Package Manager and integrate the framework into the original code base, along with Unit and UI testing. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build applications that are scalable, faster, and easier to maintain.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Setting up your project


Setting up for Swift from an existing Objective-C project just takes a minute and Xcode is usually able to do it for you, but in case you're lost, you've faced an issue, or you want to know exactly how everything works, this section is for you.

Importing Objective-C in Swift

This is usually how we discover the interoperability layer. An existing Objective-C code base is getting upgraded to Swift and you need to expose existing Objective-C classes to your new Swift code. 

In Swift, all of your classes are available in the current module, depending on their access control scopes. In Objective-C, one developer need is to import a header through the #import "MyClass.h" directive or the module through @import ExternalLibrary. In order to expose your classes to Swift, you'll need to use a bridging header. Its responsibility is to expose only the classes you wish to the Swift compiler.

The bridging header is a header file that contains all of the import statements of the libraries...