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)

Building Your First Web App

This chapter takes you directly to server-side Swift coding with detailed instructions on creating a new web app project from a template provided in the web framework. You'll be guided to create, build, run, and test a Hello World! web app using Vapor 3.0. The files and directories in a typical Vapor web app will be reviewed, and their usages will be further explained. After that, you'll learn how to expand the features of the web app by adding more new routes to handle additional requests from client. You will continue your journey to create a similar Hello World! web app with the Kitura web framework. After going through an exercise showing you how to build a simple web app with both Vapor and Kitura, you'll take note of the similarities between the two web frameworks and appreciate the different approaches taken by them.

Before we...