The Cozy World

Currently there are several different ways to create an iOS app, but there are two main approaches at the present time. First, create the app with Swift (the language created by Apple to replace Objective-C) and second, make the app using React Native (the JavaScript UI library created by Facebook). Each approach has it own pros and cons. This article is going to compare the two approaches, and hopefully to give you some ideas of what is involved in each approach before creating your first app. Using Swift Swift is easy to set up for development, you just launch Xcode on your Mac machine and you can start development right away (zero bootstrapping is required). Also, Swift supports Linux (even on Raspberry Pi ) and you can create web apps using Swift as well (using server-side frameworks such as Vapor). However, supporting Linux does not mean you can create a full-blown iOS app purely from Linux, because you need Xcode (i.e.: on your Mac) to compile the app and t...

Swift was introduced as a proprietary language by Apple in 2014, and it was open-sourced in 2015. Initially, Swift is used mainly for iOS development, but now developers are starting to use it for web development via the server-side Swift frameworks . One of the frameworks is called Vapor , which is the only one currently written purely in Swift. Codeanywhere is a cloud-based development environment, basically consisting of virtual machines (similar to DigitalOcean ) and a full-fledged code editor. Recently, Codeanywhere has started to provide a Swift container (like the Docker concept), for assisting developers to jumpstart Swift development. Unfortunately, the Swift release provided in the container is only version 2.2, while the Vapor framework requires version 3 or above. This article is going to show you how to upgrade the Swift release in the pre-defined container, download the Vapor framework/example, and launch the Vapor example in the Codeanywhere environment. Step 1...