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

Creating a library package


In order to create a package, you will use the swift package command.

Running the command without any argument will print in the terminal the different options and subcommands you can run. As we are getting started, here are the most important ones:

  • swift package init: Initializes a new package.
  • swift package update: Updates package dependencies.
  • swift package generate-xcodeproj: Generates an Xcode project.
  • swift package describe: Describes the current package.

As we are getting started with SPM, the command we are the most interested in is swift package init.

Note

Swift Package Manager is designed to build command-line tools and libraries for Linux and macOS targets. You will not be able to depend on Apple's proprietary frameworks, such as UIKit. Note that swift web apps (Kitura- or Vapor-based) are a perfect scenario to use SPM.

For the example, we'll recreate a popular HTTP client library, inspired by the popular node.js request library.

As the library's goal is to be...