Server Side Swift – Quick Start
Building Swift web applications allows you to reuse the skills you already have. However, you can also start from scratch if you are not an ”iPhone mac„ developer. This article shows you the most popular Server-Side Swift frameworks and lets you dive into the world of faster and safer APIs using Swift.
Swift was released in 2014. Ever since then, it has become a popular solution for the iOS and macOS development. Since Swift was the open source and people started playing with it. There were a lot of attempts to find other usages of Swift. They turned out to be perfect for the server-side while being faster and safer than other languages. The next step in the process was to apply Swift to the server-side development. Here, it is important to mention that Swift can be compiled on macOS as well as Linux and even Windows. Moreover, some frameworks allow developers to create cloud applications.
Just after Server-Side Swift has been released I felt the urge to take a quick look on it. It was really hard to tell if it at that point, it was ready for commercial use. Now, as I look at it, I would say it is stable enough. So let’s try to compare the most popular frameworks. Personally, I would recommend trying each framework before you even pick the one that works best for you – there are slight differences between them.
Currently, the most popular Server-Side Swift frameworks are Vapor, Perfect and Kitura. There are also a few other ones such as Zewo and NozelIO, however they’re not as popular, but that doesn’t take away from their value. As a matter of fact, I looked into each framework and my verdict is: Perfect and Vapor.
Why Server-Side Swift?
A few years ago, when Server-Side Swift was still new to me, I wasn’t convinced that it would be the optimal language for backend specific. Why? Because it worked just like every other backend solution and there was nothing particularly specific in it making it special, but still for me as an IOS developer it allowed me to be at a full-stack. I know Java and JS and, in my opinion, the newest technologies are good to get hold of mainly because they let us become better developers. I haven’t found too many tutorials or articles about it. Certainly not as many as there are about Java or JS. Therefore, you have to create lots of things on your own. In my opinion, Swift is also faster than other languages. If you want to compare it with others, here is the benchmark server-side swift frameworks vs nodeJS.
Tools
SPM – Swift Package Manager – manages the distribution Swift code, integrated with the build system to automate downloading, compiling and linking dependencies process runs on Mac and Linux.
XCode – Apple IDE to compile and debug Obj-C and Swift code.
AppCode – Jetbrains IDE for compile and debug Obj-C and Swift code.
Other text editors like Brackets, VS Code, Sublime etc. + SPM
There are also a bunch of very specific tools for the frameworks and I will tell a bit more about that in a quick overview below.
Overview
Vapor
It has a very active community and simple syntax as well. This framework is mostly focused on being written purely in Swift. Just as the Vapor – Swift is a very readable and understandable API, due to the fact that it keeps the naming and conventions.
Data formats:
JSON, XML
Databases:
MySQL, PostgresSQL, SQLite, MongoSB
Cloud:
Heroku, Amazon Web Services and Vapor Cloud
Tools:
Vapor toolbox
Perfect:
The most popular framework for the server-side swift development and as the author claims, it is production ready and can be used with commercial products. This one is highly recommended to use as it’s big, powerful and fast. The framework is updated on a monthly basis.
Data formats:
JSON, XML, native support for direct operations on files, directories and .zip files
Databases:
MySQL, PostgresSQL, SQLite, CouchDB, MongoSB, MariaDB, FileMaker
Cloud:
Heroku, Amazon Web Services
Tools:
Perfect Assistant
Kitura:
This Framework is like a WebFramework. Kitura is unique in its approach to databases. Example SQL DB types Kitura uses abstraction layer called “Kuery” instead of “Query”. Kuery supports MySQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL. Kitura also has support for Redis, CouchDB, Apache Cassandra and ScyllaDB, but through native packages these are not related to Kuery.
Supported Data formats:
JSON, Aphid MQTT (IoT/IoT Messaging)
Databases:
MySQL, PostgresSQL, SQLite, CouchDB, Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB
Cloud:
Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Pivotal Web Services, IBM Bluemix
Tools:
Kitura CLI
Summary
Server-Side Swift is a fast growing solution and can be used commercially with the newest technologies like cloud. After a few years, we have acquired a mature language and amazing frameworks which constantly make Server-Side Swift better. When it comes to the Vapor and Perfect, both of them seems to be in a pretty good shape by now. Vapor, for example, is growing quite fast since its first release in September 2016 and currently there is 3.1 version of it available. Perfect has similar qualities and was first released in November 2015. As I mentioned before, I would personally recommend trying to play a bit with each framework before choosing the right one.
Tutorials and code examples
Perfect
Vapor
Kitura
Swift NIO:
Released by Apple on 1st March 2018 – low-level, cross platform, event driven network application framework.
Other frameworks
There are also Zewo and NozelIO but those just based on Swift and Zewo is a Go-Style framework, NozelIO is the node.js style framework.
Swift for specific OS
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