Here, we'll begin our journey into learning SwiftUI by building our very own SwiftUI app. We'll start by learning the history of the Swift programming language, which will act as a good foundation for understanding the core concepts of Swift development. Together, we'll build an app with custom animations and everyday elements that work seamlessly for iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. From this, we'll see the benefits of writing good, clean code—once—for multiple devices. Once we have our working app, we'll cover testing and debugging, and see how crafting our code in the right way from the start can make this much simpler to implement.
We'll get started with the history of Swift before getting hands-on into Xcode, where we'll learn just how simple, yet powerful, developing in SwiftUI really is. In this chapter, we'll get you primed and ready for your journey into SwiftUI by first of all introducing you to the Swift programming language, along with the existing UIKit framework. We'll then discuss what SwiftUI brings to the table, and how it sits not only within a new project but in your existing projects too.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Introducing Swift as a programming language
- Learning about existing UI frameworks
- Introducing SwiftUI
- When to use SwiftUI, and why