Swift is yet another programming language, introduced in 2014 by Apple. According to them, Swift is a general-purpose programming language, built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns. They created the language to help make development on their platform more fun and productive as their flagship language Objective-C is bit dated and has a very distinct syntax that makes it hard for anyone to quickly get started.
A few years ago, Swift was open sourced and the Swift community has pushed the language forward by trying to build server components using Swift. This has led to the creation of the term server-side Swift. So what is server-side Swift? What are the benefits of using it on the server? Can it be used to build different stacks of your application?
In this chapter, we will answer those questions while getting our feet wet in the world of server-side Swift. We'll cover the following:
- Learning about modern app development
- Seeing how Swift has evolved
- Looking at the benefits of server-side Swift
- Learning about the Swift package manager and its CLI
- Building a simple library and an executable Swift package
- Learning how web servers work and building a simple web server in pure Swift
- Discovering server-side web frameworks for Swift and Swift package catalog
- Learning about Vapor, one of the most used server-side web frameworks for Swift
- Going over the idea for the apps we will be building in the book
