Any iOS developer, at some point, feels the need to make the step from basic to advanced concepts.
You can get a lot of mileage from the fundamentals of Swift and iOS development.
But working on complex projects demands a new set of tools if you want your code to be reusable and remain at the same time maintainable and testable.
If you are looking to expand your Swift knowledge into more advanced topics and understand why you would need such concepts, this article is for you.
The mobile market is exploding, and iOS developers are in high demand.
The talent shortage keeps driving salaries higher and higher, even for entry-level positions. Software development is also one of the lucky jobs that you can do remotely. It’s understandable then that more and more people want to become iOS developers.
Money and freedom are great, of course, but they are not everything. Many of us make iOS apps to create something we are proud of and make a difference in many people’s lives.
Becoming an iOS developer takes some effort, though. So it’s crucial to focus on the right things and not waste time on useless activities. That’s why I wrote this detailed, step-by-step guide.
Networking is a requirement for most modern iOS apps.
Networked apps usually interface with a remote web service that provides data. And often, such a web service is a REST API that returns data in JSON format.
Writing the networking layer of an iOS app, though, is not a simple task. When making asynchronous network calls, you need to combine several features of Swift, SwiftUI, and the Foundation framework. Moreover, many parts of your app’s architecture need to interact, making the task more complicated than it might seem at first.
SwiftUI offers several mechanisms to pass data between views.
Such abundance can make it hard to decide which data flow mechanism fits any particular situation.
Those decisions cannot be taken in isolation. As in many other cases, we need to keep an app’s architecture in mind to make the correct choice.
Since the introduction of SwiftUI, the MVVM pattern has seen a new renaissance. Many developers believe that this particular pattern fits well with the SwiftUI data flow.
MVVM certainly has some good ideas, but it also brings along problems because of the various discording interpretations of the pattern and its rigidity.
In this article, we will see how MVVM fits in iOS apps written in SwiftUI, how to take advantage of its benefits, and how to avoid its problems.
Encoding and decoding data is a fundamental part of iOS apps.
That is especially true for the JSON data we get from REST APIs.
In the past, decoding JSON in iOS apps required a lot of boilerplate code and sometimes fancy techniques.
But thanks to the Codable protocols introduced of Swift 4, today we have a native and idiomatic way to encode and decode data.
The Codable protocols allow for simple JSON decoding that can sometimes take only a couple of lines of code. But they also allow for more sophisticated techniques when you have special needs.
We will explore all that in this article.
Many developers find unit testing confusing. This is made worse by the advanced techniques you need to test classes or asynchronous code, like the one for network requests.
In reality, at the base of unit testing, there are simple fundamental concepts. Once you grasp those, unit testing suddenly becomes more approachable.
