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

Summarizing protocol-oriented programming and object-oriented programming


In this chapter and Chapter 5, Object-Oriented Programming we saw how Swift can be used as both an object-oriented programming language and a protocol-oriented programming language. In these chapters, we saw there were two major differences between the two designs.

The first major difference that we saw is that with a protocol-oriented design we should start with the protocol rather than a superclass. We can then use protocol extensions to add functionality to the types that conform to that protocol or types that conform to protocols that inherit from that protocol. With object-oriented programming, we started with a superclass. When we designed our vehicle types in a protocol-oriented way we converted the Vehicle superclass, from the object-oriented design, to a Vehicle protocol, and then used a protocol extension to add the common functionality needed.

In the protocol-oriented example, we used protocol inheritance...