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

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Server Swift

Swift is yet another programming language, introduced in 2014 by Apple. According to them, Swift is a general-purpose programming language, built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns. They created the language to help make development on their platform more fun and productive as their flagship language Objective-C is bit dated and has a very distinct syntax that makes it hard for anyone to quickly get started.

A few years ago, Swift was open sourced and the Swift community has pushed the language forward by trying to build server components using Swift. This has led to the creation of the term server-side Swift. So what is server-side Swift? What are the benefits of using it on the server? Can it be used to build different stacks of your application?

In this chapter, we will answer those questions while getting our feet wet in the world of server-side Swift. We'll cover the following:

  • Learning about modern app development
  • Seeing how Swift has evolved
  • Looking at the benefits of server-side Swift
  • Learning about the Swift package manager and its CLI
  • Building a simple library and an executable Swift package
  • Learning how web servers work and building a simple web server in pure Swift
  • Discovering server-side web frameworks for Swift and Swift package catalog
  • Learning about Vapor, one of the most used server-side web frameworks for Swift
  • Going over the idea for the apps we will be building in the book