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

What are ORM and Fluent?


ORM stands for object-relational mapping and is a very important technique in application development, especially for those applications that interact with databases. Traditionally, to store or retrieve data from the database, you need to write SQL, which stands for the structured query language. After executing an SQL query, you get back a table full of data that needs to be mapped to objects of a certain class, to make it easy to interact with the raw data that is returned from the database.

For example, if we have a table full of Shopping Lists, then it would be good if we got back an array of objects of the type ShoppingList, instead of an array of dictionary objects containing column names and column value key pairs. Using a mapping technique, we can convert this raw data stored in the database into an object of a certain type, and vice versa. This allows us to write more concise and elegant code, without having to worry about how to convert a row of data into...