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)

Introducing Server-Side Swift

Swift is a strongly and statically typed programming language that has been used extensively for client-side development in iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. The open source developer community has brought Swift to the Linux platforms, making Swift a cross-platform programming language. In this chapter, we will explain why the open source developer community has extended Swift for server-side development, and how they have streamlined the workflow for both server and client-side development using the same programming language.

There are several server-side Swift frameworks, and most of them are developed and maintained by the Swift developer community. We will take a closer look at the three top server-side Swift frameworks: Vapor, Kitura, and Perfect. Each of these frameworks has a different set of features and benefits. We hope that you feel comfortable with choosing the right Swift server-side framework for your next server-side project.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing Swift
  • Surveying Swift server-side frameworks
  • Choosing the right framework