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)

Serving clients with the RESTful API

The RESTful API refers to an interface that is based on the REST architectural style and separates the implementation of web services on a server from the user interface implemented by a client. This separation provides good portability for a web service so it can serve different clients across multiple platforms, and offers great user experience for the client so it can keep the native design of the client platform and provides a uniform look and feel to the users.

In general, the REST architecture assumes a stateless server, hence the session state is kept entirely on the client side. Each HTTP request the client makes must contain all information the server needs to understand the request and provide an expected response. In Chapter 9, Adding Authentication, you've already learned how to maintain the session of a successful login via...