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)

Working with Template Engines

This chapter introduces you to two templating engines: Leaf for Vapor and Stencil for Kitura. Templating languages allow you to work with content automatically generated by a script. For dynamic content, you'll learn how template engines help to accelerate development for dynamic web pages. Dynamic content creation is useful when presenting results of data generated at run-time and that are not known beforehand. For static content, you'll learn how templating engines help to ensure a consistent structure, such as headers and footers, and appearance characteristics, such as color scheme and background. You'll further get introduced to the nuts and bolts of the Leaf and Stencil templating languages and learn how to use variables and tags in template scripts to communicate information between Swift classes and script functions.

Let&apos...