Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By : Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By: Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone

Overview of this book

Swift keeps gaining traction not only amongst Apple developers but also as a server-side language. This book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. You’ll begin with a quick refresher on Swift, the compiler, the standard library, and the foundation, followed by the Cocoa design patterns – the ones at the core of many cocoa libraries – to follow up with the creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as defined by the GoF. You'll get acquainted with application architecture, as well as the most popular architectural design patterns, such as MVC and MVVM, and learn to use them in the context of Swift. In addition, you’ll walk through dependency injection and functional reactive programming. Special emphasis will be given to techniques to handle concurrency, including callbacks, futures and promises, and reactive programming. These techniques will help you adopt a test-driven approach to your workflow in order to use Swift Package Manager and integrate the framework into the original code base, along with Unit and UI testing. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build applications that are scalable, faster, and easier to maintain.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we covered everything that I consider a prerequisite for the rest of this book. We started with classes, the basic building blocks of OOP. You should now be really familiar with them. Structs are unusual constructions for someone coming from OOP, but they are very useful in Swift, as they behave as values, can be immutable, and have other nice properties. With enums, you'll be able to write even more expressive code.

Functions and closures are first-class citizens in Swift, and should be treated as such. Currying is a powerful pattern that lets you reuse functions; in later chapters, you'll see how to use it to write clean code.

The concept of protocols opens the world of protocol extensions and protocol-oriented programming, which is a complex subject. In the following chapters, we'll look at various use cases for implementing particular patterns through protocol extensions.

In the next chapter, we'll focus on memory management and ARC. While value types are not subject to reference counting, classes, functions, and closures interact with each other, and can lead to memory-related crashes and other issues.