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

A refresher on MVC


MVC is a design pattern that encourages separation of concerns. It was invented in 1978, and was generalized in the 80s. Smalltalk was the first language to make extensive use of this design pattern for the creation of user interfaces.

Objective-C, being heavily influenced by Smalltalk, then inherited this design pattern. AppKit and UIKit are also built around it.

While one could argue that other patterns can be just as efficient (or more so), MVC has the benefit of being widely understood by many developers, independent of their language of choice. MVC is widely used and is available in all object-oriented languages.

The theory behind the MVC pattern

Let's go back to the original description of the design pattern:

  • Model classes are used to represent knowledge and data. A model can be represented as a single object or structures.
  • View classes are used to represent the data to the user.
  • Controller classes are used to validate input from the user, passing it to the model layer...