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 Bootstrap for a Vapor application

After learning the basics of Bootstrap and choosing icons from the Font Awesome library, you can start putting everything together to upgrade the feel and look of web pages rendered by the Leaf templating engine.

To use Bootstrap in your Vapor project, you're required to use the file server middleware. Simply uncomment the following line in configure.swift:

middlewares.use(FileMiddleware.self) // Serves files from `Public/` directory
  1. The file server will make all the resource in /Public available for HTTP requests.
  2. Create two subdirectories, /css and /img, under /Public.
  3. Copy custom.css and pier.png from the resources for this chapter to /Public/css and /Public/img, respectively.
  4. The CSS stylesheet will be included in header.leaf:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/custom.css">

Remember the path for Vapor...