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

UIViewController


Having properly framed the MVC pattern in a general context, we can take a look at the specificities of UIViewController.

 

The best way to get a proper understanding of view controllers is to consult the official documentation at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontroller:

"The UIViewController class defines the shared behavior that is common to all view controllers. You rarely create instances of the UIViewController class directly. Instead, you subclass UIViewController and add the methods and properties needed to manage the view controller's view hierarchy."

From this quote, we can gather the following:

  • UIViewController provides shared behaviors
  • Those behaviors are intended to be used on view controllers
  • You use subclassing in order to benefit from those behaviors
  • You use subclassing in order to manage the view controller/views hierarchy

Something interesting about this quote; it doesn't talk about application state, networking, or persistence; the only...