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

View rendering in Vapor app


In Chapter 3Getting Started with Vapor, we created a web application using Vapor that simply printed Hello World. We also got a little flavor of dynamic HTML generation using Leaf where we passed a name in the URL route that got rendered in the HTML. In that example application, we got everything out of box configured and working. In our current ShoppingListServer Vapor application, we do not have a view renderer and instead render data in the JSON format only. To add HTML rendering, we will need to add a template rendering engine. Currently, there is one rendering engine that is officially supported by Vapor team, and that is Leaf.

What is Leaf?

Leaf is a pure Swift templating engine that lets you generate text output, given a template file and a bunch of variables. Leaf can be used by other server-side Swift frameworks and is not specific to HTML rendering. It can be used to generate code or any textual configuration file. In Vapor, it is used to render HTML...