Category: Protocol Oriented

Some best practices for designing and coding Swift classes

My original article — “Best Practices for Building Swift Classes” — was published on appcoda.com.

Follow along as I write this tutorial’s Swift code in a playground! Download from GitHub.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you some best practices that will help you design and implement classes (reference types) and then safely leverage reference semantics in Swift. Protocol-oriented programming (POP) and value semantics are all the rage now, but a promising new technology doesn’t mean you should throw all your classes away. Why not add some simple constructs to your classes like copy initializers, default initializers, designated initializers, failable initializers, deinitializers, and conformance to the Equatable protocol? To get real about my sample code, I’ll adopt these constructs in some classes and show you my best practices working in real life for drawing in your iOS app interfaces.

I’ll walk through the process of creating several protocols, creating classes that adopt those protocols, implement inheritance in these classes, and use instances of the classes (objects), all to illustrate my best practices — and to show some of the extra steps you may have to go through when working with classes.

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Building a generic doubly linked list using protocol-oriented Swift 4

My original article — “Protocol-oriented Data Structures in Swift 4: A Generic Doubly Linked List” — was published on appcoda.com.

Follow along with this tutorial! Download the Swift 4 code from GitHub.

Let’s talk about creating a list on steroids, i.e., a generic doubly linked list in Swift. For our purposes here, a list is a software receptacle that contains related data that we’re interested in inspecting, organizing, manipulating, etc. A doubly linked list stores a list of “nodes.” Each node contains data, knows about the preceding node in the list, and knows about the following node in the list. We’ll talk about adding nodes to the list, removing nodes from the list, displaying information stored in nodes in the list, and traversing the list. I’ve used the term generic because you’ll see that I can store store pretty much every built-in or custom Swift type in my linked list, like Double, UINavigationController, Int, CGFloat, UIView, CGAffineTransform… You can even store a collection of instances of a custom class or struct in my list (see section “Storing custom types” below). Most importantly, I’ll show you how to move towards generic programming, also known as generics, parametric polymorphism, templates, or parameterized types, where, when possible, we can write code that applies to many types, and thus reduces code redundancy.

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Self versus self in Swift 4 – capital “S” and lowercase “s”

RELATED: Find out how to make a copy of a class instance (object) using a C++-like copy constructor — a copy initializer in Swift.

Those of you who’ve used Objective-C and Swift for any meaningful length of time must be familiar with the self property of structs and classes. I’m not sure how many are aware of the Self “type” (sometimes called a “requirement”). I would be very interested in knowing how many understand the difference between self and Self. I’m talking about self with lower-case “s,” which I’ll call “small self” herein. It’s pretty well documented. Similarly, Self with an upper-case “S,” is what I’ll call “tall self” herein. It’s not very well documented.

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Class copy constructors in Swift 4 for defensive copying

Swift tutorials by iosbrain.com Notice that Swift almost seems to frown on making a copy of a reference type, i.e., a copy of an instance of a class, or, as some would rather put it, getting a copy of an object. I’m not talking about getting another reference to a class, I’m talking about getting an entire, separate copy of a class instance. This frowning on class copying is not an accident. Swift’s language architects want the syntax and semantics of the language to be crystal clear. They want developers to be confident that reference types and value types will both have 1) distinct and obvious meanings and that both types will 2) behave consistently. But still, why not be able to safely make a copy of a class instance? I’ll show you how in this tutorial by borrowing the copy constructor concept from C++. In Swift, we’d call this a “copy initializer.” (NOTE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about NSCopying in Cocoa and Objective-C.)

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Two Structural Design Patterns in Swift: Facade and Adapter

Swift tutorials by iosbrain.com My original article — “Design Patterns in Swift #3: Facade and Adapter” — was published on appcoda.com.

This tutorial is the third installment in my series on design patterns. I started with a tutorial examining two examples of patterns in the “creational” category: factory method and singleton. I then discussed two examples of patterns in the “behavioral” category: observer and memento. In this tutorial, I’ll explain two examples of patterns in the “structural” category: facade and adapter. I urge you to review my first two posts mentioned above so you can familiarize yourself with the concept of software design patterns. Beyond a brief reminder today of what constitutes a design pattern, I’m not going to regurgitate all the definitions again. All the information you need to get up to speed is in my first to tutorials, here and here.

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Swift 4.2 improvements? Member/dot syntax for subscripts. Trying it out in a protocol-oriented, generic linked list.

The code shown herein will only compile and link in Xcode 10 beta and run on iOS 12 beta and/or OS X 10.14 beta.

While working on a Swift protocol-oriented and generic linked list, I got to thinking about Apple’s “improvements” to version 4.2 of their flagship language. Since a linked list is a list, I thought, “Why not add a subscript to my linked list to facilitate finding specific nodes in my list?” I did that in Swift 4.1 and got what most developers would’ve expected, e.g., used linkedList["node4"] to get the node in the list associated with the keyword “node4.” With Swift 4.2, I can use the controversial new @dynamicMemberLookup language attribute and implement dot/member notation, like linkedList.node4 to get that same node in the list associated with “node4.” Big improvement, huh? Well, maybe. We’ll talk about how this new and improved subscript is more than just about syntactic sugar, but that the “driving motivation for this feature is to improve interoperability with inherently dynamic languages like Python, Javascript, Ruby and others.” Note that all code shown in this tutorial was written in two Xcode 10 beta playgrounds.

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Swift 4.2 improvements to Collection and Sequence protocols with method allSatisfy

The code shown herein will only compile and link in Xcode 10 beta and run in iOS 12 beta and/or OS X 10.14 beta.

We’re in the middle of Apple’s annual product upgrade cycle and this article is the first in a series of tutorials meant to highlight the most important new features of Swift 4.2. Instead of trying to cover all of the 4.2 features/improvements in one very long article, I’m going go talk about each aspect of the new 4.2 version, one or two features at a time. (If you’re interested in more details as to why I’m focused on 4.2, see section “Swift version methodology” below.) Today, I’ll cover the allSatisfy(_:) instance method (see also here) of the Sequence protocol (see also here), of course intimately related to the Collection protocol (see also here).

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The iOS file system in-depth (and how to be the best using critical thinking)

Have you ever wondered how all those people out there figured out how to manipulate the iOS file system in their apps? For some strange reason, Apple has never provided well-organized documentation on the subject. Here’s how I feel: “Ask and simple question and get an obtuse and overly complex answer.” There are many articles and tutorials out there, including my own, showing you examples of Objective-C or Swift code for manipulating the iOS file system, and most of the code looks basically the same. Nonetheless, this code is deceivingly complex, often underestimated, and rarely well-explained or well-understood.

Where did everybody find this boilerplate code? From simple observation, I’ve found that in many cases, developers use a copy and paste methodology, i.e., look up a few keywords in a web search engine, find the code needed on sites like StackOverflow or some blog, copy it, paste it into an Xcode project, and beat on it until it works. I don’t want you to feel this way after reading my tutorials.

I hope you’ll find it edifying and interesting to read about how I figured out how to understand and navigate the iOS file system using the “most of the code looks basically the same” boilerplates. But I bet you’ll find it even more intriguing to find that I’ve discovered an much better alternative to the boilerplate code.

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iOS file management with FileManager in protocol-oriented Swift 4

NOTE: My latest tutorial has just been released, which uses the code shown herein to introduce error handling in Swift 4.

[Download the Xcode 9 project from GitHub so you can follow along with my code explanation and try iOS file management features yourself!]

How many of you have written iOS apps that work with files? I’m talking about developing apps that read, write, create, copy, move, and delete files in the app’s sandboxed file system. I’m not talking about reading an image from your app bundle so you can display it on screen, like so:

I’m talking about apps like Adobe Photoshop Express which is only useful if it can edit image files; Apple’s Pages and Numbers apps which are only useful if they can edit word processor and spreadsheet/chart files, respectively; and, Microsoft Word which is only useful if it can edit word processor documents. Yes, you can solely work from/in the cloud with all these apps, but you can also opt to store files locally on your devices. What if you open an email attachment or download a file from Safari? I guarantee you that many apps with associations to certain file extensions store those attachments or downloads locally first for editing and display, and only later sync files with iCloud or Dropbox.

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Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: Advanced Applications

The original article – Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: Is it better than Object Oriented Programming? – was published on appcoda.com.

Introduction

We’re going to talk in-depth about protocol-oriented programming (POP) using Swift 4 in this article. This post is the second and final article in a two part series. If you haven’t read the first, introductory article, please do so before continuing onwards. Today, we’ll: discuss why Swift is considered a “protocol-oriented” language, compare POP and object-oriented programming (OOP), compare value semantics and reference semantics, consider local reasoning, implement delegation with protocols, use protocols as types, use protocol polymorphism, review my real-world POP Swift code, and finally, discuss why I’ve not bought 100% into POP. Download the source code from the article so you can follow along: There are 2 playgrounds and one project on GitHub, both in Xcode 9 format and written in Swift 4.

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