In my opinion Swift is an extremely exciting and powerful language so like many others I was excited when I heard Apple’s decision to Open Source Swift and even more when a Linux compatible version of Swift was released. Writing apps for different platforms with Swift sounded exciting but what immediately started running through my mind was the ability to do server side development with Swift much like I have done with JavaScript, Java and C#.
I started to review the different options available and I finally decided to take the next step of going from reading/dreaming about the possibilities to actually doing something. It turns out that I have the perfect opportunity as my website for DooScrib was taken offline and I would like to bring it back online (future updates to the plugin planned).
The following is the environment that I have chosen:
Server Side Frameworks
There are actually several choices out there and as time progressed, I narrowed down the options that I was most interested in to the following:
Kitura is great and has a lot of information as well as the security of have a big name like IBM behind it. However, as a personal preference, I automatically gravitated towards Perfect and Vapor and have been watching both as they have progressed over the last few months.
To be honest, I think both Perfect and Vapor are great choices. At a later time, I might actually even pursue a separate review of Perfect.
Getting Started
So for those interested in following, I plan to write several different posts over the next few weeks as I setup a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu, install and get Swift running and finally begin working with Vapor.
Keep following and as always happy coding.
