Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By : Ankur Patel
Book Image

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift

By: Ankur Patel

Overview of this book

Making Swift an open-source language enabled it to share code between a native app and a server. Building a scalable and secure server backend opens up new possibilities, such as building an entire application written in one language—Swift. This book gives you a detailed walk-through of tasks such as developing a native shopping list app with Swift and creating a full-stack backend using Vapor (which serves as an API server for the mobile app). You'll also discover how to build a web server to support dynamic web pages in browsers, thereby creating a rich application experience. You’ll begin by planning and then building a native iOS app using Swift. Then, you'll get to grips with building web pages and creating web views of your native app using Vapor. To put things into perspective, you'll learn how to build an entire full-stack web application and an API server for your native mobile app, followed by learning how to deploy the app to the cloud, and add registration and authentication to it. Once you get acquainted with creating applications, you'll build a tvOS version of the shopping list app and explore how easy is it to create an app for a different platform with maximum code shareability. Towards the end, you’ll also learn how to create an entire app for different platforms in Swift, thus enhancing your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Adding token-based authentication for app


Great job if you have made it this far, as you have not only added authentication and registration to your app but also created a web app that can be used by multiple users to create Shopping Lists and items that only they can view and edit. The way users stay authenticated on the web is due to sessions, and they do not need to enter their password for every request they make. This is possible due to browsers storing the session token in the cookie of the browser, which gets sent to the server every time a request is made. Using the token in the cookie, it is able to decipher the user making the request by looking it up in the in-memory sessions dictionary. So this works seamlessly in the browser, but, for mobile apps making the request, there is no cookie or way to store the cookie.

For such apps, we need a different type of authentication system, which is called token-based authentication where we will send a token similar to the token stored in...