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

Fetching data from the server


Now that we have set our helper file to make network requests and configurations, we can begin making the requests to our API server. We will make a network request to our API server hitting the /shopping_lists route, which will return all of the Shopping Lists along with all of its items represented in JSON format. Swift 4 makes converting JSON into models a lot easier, thanks to the codable protocol that our models inherit from. Using a JSONDecoder, we will convert the JSON returned by our API into our models and render those on the iOS table view instead of the Shopping List that we persisted to disk using UserDefaults in Chapter 2, Creating the Native App.

To get started with loading data from our API server, we need to make changes to our ShoppingList model to implement a load method to make the network request to our API server. We also need to modify the Item model slightly and get rid of the old code to load and save data to disk using UserDefaults. Finally...