Book Image

Hands-On Server-Side Web Development with Swift

By : Angus Yeung
Book Image

Hands-On Server-Side Web Development with Swift

By: Angus Yeung

Overview of this book

This book is about building professional web applications and web services using Swift 4.0 and leveraging two popular Swift web frameworks: Vapor 3.0 and Kitura 2.5. In the first part of this book, we’ll focus on the creation of basic web applications from Vapor and Kitura boilerplate projects. As the web apps start out simple, more useful techniques, such as unit test development, debugging, logging, and the build and release process, will be introduced to readers. In the second part, we’ll learn different aspects of web application development with server-side Swift, including setting up routes and controllers to process custom client requests, working with template engines such as Leaf and Stencil to create dynamic web content, beautifying the content with Bootstrap, managing user access with authentication framework, and leveraging the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) abstraction layer (Vapor’s Fluent and Kitura’s Kuery) to perform database operations. Finally, in the third part, we’ll develop web services in Swift and build our API Gateway, microservices and database backend in a three-tier architecture design. Readers will learn how to design RESTful APIs, work with asynchronous processes, and leverage container technology such as Docker in deploying microservices to cloud hosting services such as Vapor Cloud and IBM Cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Instantiating an application object

As mentioned earlier, the app object used in main.swift is actually created in the constructor function declared in app.swift:

// File: /Sources/App/app.swift
import Vapor

/// Creates an instance of Application. This is called from main.swift in the run target.
public func app(_ env: Environment) throws -> Application { // [1]
var config = Config.default() // [2]
var env = env
var services = Services.default() // [3]
try configure(&config, &env, &services) // [4]
let app = try Application(config: config, environment: env, services: services) // [5]
try boot(app) // [6]
return app
}

The preceding code sets up the sequence of calling several functions:

  1. The app() constructor takes in the environment as a passing-in parameter
  2. The config variable is assigned to the default configuration
  3. The services variable is assigned to the default services...