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

Getting started with databases


Any large scale web application needs some kind of storage to maintain its state. Saving the state as a raw text file or in binary file format, like we did in the Shopping List iOS app with the help of UserDefaults, is not ideal and does not scale or perform well. To solve this problem, databases were created, which are collections of tables that can save data in a structured format, with the ability to retrieve and save data at very high speeds. Also, databases decouple data from our application and data can be transferred or consumed by another application, making the data portable. You can create relationships between tables inside of a database, just like you would create relationships in between objects in object-oriented programming languages. Such databases are known as relational databases. This helps us organize data just like we would in object-oriented programming languages and makes it easy for us to map the database tables to the relations we have...