Book Image

Hands-On Swift 5 Microservices Development

Book Image

Hands-On Swift 5 Microservices Development

Overview of this book

The capabilities of the Swift programming language are extended to server-side development using popular frameworks such as Vapor. This enables Swift programmers to implement the microservices approach to design scalable and easy-to-maintain architecture for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and watchOS applications. This book is a complete guide to building microservices for iOS applications. You’ll start by examining Swift and Vapor as backend technologies and compare them to their alternatives. The book then covers the concept of microservices to help you get started with developing your first microservice. Throughout this book, you’ll work on a case study of writing an e-commerce backend as a microservice application. You’ll understand each microservice as it is broken down into details and written out as code throughout the book. You’ll also become familiar with various aspects of server-side development such as scalability, database options, and information flow for microservices that are unwrapped in the process. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with microservices testing and see how it is different from testing a monolith application. Along the way, you’ll explore tools such as Docker, Postman, and Amazon Web Services. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build a ready-to-deploy application that can be used as a base for future applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

A quick review of Swift

To write server apps in Swift, we require an understanding of where Swift comes from and how it fits into the world of server languages. Swift was invented by Apple engineers as an alternative to C-derivatives, for example, C++, and, Objective-C, Objective-C++. After initially keeping Swift proprietary Apple then released Swift as open source for macOS and Linux. You might have wondered why Apple would bother to make Swift available on Linux, as Apple doesn't usually release any Linux products (not even iTunes).

Swift was designed to be a native language from the very beginning. It means an application gets compiled into binary code that runs directly on the processor, making it the fastest way for an application to run.

When Apple released Swift for Linux, there was little application. The UI was still functioning only on Apple devices, but a good...