Preface

This book is about building cross-platform software solution using Swift. The book will take the reader on a journey of building an app for iOS and extending the app to a different platform, such as the web and tvOS. The app will start out simple, but get more and more complex as it progresses. Toward the end, we will have a product that will work on iOS, tvOS, and in the browser and have a server component, all written entirely in Swift.

Through this journey, we will learn how Swift has progressed from a language used just for iOS to a language that can be used on the server side. We will also learn how to build server-side packages using Swift and Vapor, which is one of the most popular Swift packages for building web servers. Using Vapor, we will build a full-stack web application that will act as an API server for our iOS and tvOS app, and will also be our web server, which will render a web view of our app. Several technologies will be covered while building the backend, including MongoDB, which is a non-relational database.

We will be using Swift 4 throughout the book and will cover new features introduced in this version of Swift. We will use Xcode 9 as our IDE to build for these different platforms, and readers will learn how to share code and development tools to make development fun and productive. We will also use Vapor 2.0 to build our server in Swift, and learn how the framework makes it easy to build rich backends for our application.

I hope that on this journey, you will learn how to write code in these different application stacks. By the end of this book, you should feel comfortable building your next product using Swift. From building a native app, to the backend, to a marketing page, or web app, you will have the knowledge to get hands-on with Swift to build your next big idea.