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)

Using the Leaf templating engine in Vapor

Leaf is Vapor's official templating engine and it was created specifically for Vapor. With the template engine, you'll find it easy to pass information from the Swift source code to the Leaf template. The compiled templating source code will then be used to render the final HTML content automatically for you.

There are many different reasons for using a template language. First, you can use templates to help reuse code that's shared across multiple web pages. Next, you can use various tagging syntax to help generate code dynamically and programmatically. Finally, you can embed one template into another and doing so helps you accelerate the development of content.

You will continue the myJournal project from the previous chapter and use the Leaf template engine to enhance the project's features.

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