Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By : Ankur Patel
Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By: Ankur Patel

Overview of this book

Making Swift an open-source language enabled it to share code between a native app and a server. Building a scalable and secure server backend opens up new possibilities, such as building an entire application written in one language—Swift. This book gives you a detailed walk-through of tasks such as developing a native shopping list app with Swift and creating a full-stack backend using Vapor (which serves as an API server for the mobile app). You'll also discover how to build a web server to support dynamic web pages in browsers, thereby creating a rich application experience. You’ll begin by planning and then building a native iOS app using Swift. Then, you'll get to grips with building web pages and creating web views of your native app using Vapor. To put things into perspective, you'll learn how to build an entire full-stack web application and an API server for your native mobile app, followed by learning how to deploy the app to the cloud, and add registration and authentication to it. Once you get acquainted with creating applications, you'll build a tvOS version of the shopping list app and explore how easy is it to create an app for a different platform with maximum code shareability. Towards the end, you’ll also learn how to create an entire app for different platforms in Swift, thus enhancing your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Debugging the app and server side by side


One of the benefits of using Xcode and Swift for both frontend and backend development is the ability to develop and debug both iOS and Vapor apps at the same time. To see this in action we need to do the following: 

  1. Open ShoppingListController.swift in the server project and put a breakpoint by clicking on the line number that is inside the index method, as follows:
  1. Go to the ShoppingList.swift model in our iOS project and click on the line inside the completion handler of the request so we can inspect the response we get back from the server, as follows:
  1. Trigger a request to fetch the data again from the app by pulling down on the table view:

Once you have triggered a refresh by pulling down on the table view, you would have seen the Xcode pause execution at the line where we put the breakpoint in the index method of the Shopping List controller. Here we can inspect the req and print objects in the console, if needed, to help us debug an issue and...