Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Swift has become the number one language used in iOS and macOS development. The Swift standard library is developed using protocol-oriented programming techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, every Swift developer should understand these powerful concepts and how to take advantage of them in their application design. This book will help you understand the differences between object-oriented programming and protocol-oriented programming. It will demonstrate how to work with protocol-oriented programming using real-world use cases. You will gain a solid knowledge of the various types that can be used in Swift and the differences between value and reference types. You will be taught how protocol-oriented programming techniques can be used to develop very flexible and easy-to-maintain code. By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of protocol-oriented programming and how to utilize it to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Swift as an object-oriented programming language


Swift provides full support for developing applications in an object-oriented way. Prior to Swift 2, I considered Swift to be primarily an object-oriented language in the same way that I considered Java and C# to be object-oriented languages. In this section, we will be designing the vehicle types in an object-oriented way and looking at the advantages and the disadvantages of this design.

Before we look at the code, let's create a very basic class diagram that shows how we would design the vehicle class hierarchy for the object-oriented design. In an object-oriented design, we use class hierarchies to group the similarly related classes. Since Swift is a single inheritance language, a class can only have one super class that it inherits from. The root class in a class hierarchy is the only class without a super class.

I usually start off by doing a very basic diagram that simply shows the classes themselves without much detail. This helps me...