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)

Swift on the server

What does it look like to run a Swift application on a server? When Swift was released as open source, it was released for Linux right away as well. Specifically, Swift favors the Linux flavor, Ubuntu. Hosting a Swift application is very different from traditional web hosting. If you get a web hosting package from companies such as GoDaddy, you will not see them say "Runs Swift 5". Most mainstream web hosters only offer scripting languages. The reasoning is simple:

  • Most applications use scripting languages.
  • Scripting applications can share the same server.

Swift, on the other hand, as a native language, is the actual web server itself. What that means is that your Swift application is directly responding to incoming requests. Let's look at the following aspects of server-side Swift:

  • A self-contained server
  • Linux/Ubuntu
  • SwiftNIO
  • Docker

Let...