Last nights IOS Development meetup @ Deloittes Digital in Belfast had two very different talks including one that is currently of interest to me for a project I am scoping.
SSS or Server Side Swift was the topic of the second talk by Matt. Its a subject that seems to be on developers radars and specifically of interest I suspect to IOS developers looking for some commonality between front end and back end tooling. As previously mentioned I came across IBM Kitura in the context of a Devslopes Udemy course entitled Server API Development in Swift, Kitura, & Bluemix. This course covers a lot of the plumbing and setup required to get Kitura working in a simple IOS app – well worth a look. You can get the code here or the Docker container here. Other frameworks are available !
So when I when saw the topic of the talk I was interested in learning more about the SSS options. Matt started with some of the advantages of SSS as an additional tooling options and then covered the 4 variants Kitura, Vapor, Perfect and Zewo – which I must say I hadn’t come across. Looking at the popularity and resources of the various offerings and simple code examples of using – Matt showed a similar simplicity in the approaches that should make it easy enough to use any of the options. Personally Kitura would be my choice – more because of the Bluemix platform and its availability of Xpages as a runtime – but that would probably not be the same for other developers. Matt mentioned the other ports of Swift to Linux, Pi, Android and Windows – something to dig a little deeper into I suspect.
The use of the Vapor framework for coding an IOS app with SSS as an example and how to simply integrate with Xcode for development and debug was shown. Matt mentioned using Heroku to deploy the app using github. The talk was enjoyable and informative and has opened some further areas of research for me.
In the first talk – Jason Karayiannis – a User Experience Designer took us on a thought journey entitled “Are Apple changing the way we design for mobile?”. Specifically the weight and strength of the Apple design philosophy and guidelines for application development were the core of the talk although it took in Material Design and its contribution to the design process. Jason mentioned the interactions between Deloitte and Apple and the fact that the mobile application design philosophy needs to be underpinned with strong and proven guidelines. I took his point that development can benefit from the “branding” inherent in the design philosophies rather than trying to retain client branding at the cost of inconsistency. In fact I’d say the watchphrase for the talk was Consistency in Design and the need for coherence between Design and Development. Food for thought.