Everything You Need To Know About Apple’s Swift

The beauty of technology and science lies in their constant evolution, continuous breakthroughs and progresses. In recent times, many new frameworks and languages have been developed in order to provide programmers with better tools to come up with robust, fast and dynamic applications (whether web apps or mobile apps) that provide a better user experience for the end users. Swift is one of the most promising programming languages in recent times that has managed to get the expectation levels skyrocket and has generated a lot of buzz in the technology circles.

Launched by Apple in 2014 at the World Wide Developers
Conference (WWDC), Swift is a powerful programming language
for the Apple’s OS platforms – iOS, OS X, watchOS and the tvOS.

With Apple making it open source last year in the WWDC, a lot iOS mobile application development companies have gotten into working with the language and there is a lot of demand from the consumer end as well for products developed using Swift. Read on to learn more about Swift and why it is much sought after.

Swift – a dynamic and powerful programming language

A programming language is usually preferred by developers if it is powerful, easy to work with and fast; Swift is so much more and hence its meteoric rise to fame! Swift code can work seamlessly with Objective –C code and migrating from Objective C to Swift is quite easy as well. With Swift being easy to learn and program with, this migration is beneficial to programmers. In the latest version, Swift 2, there have been a lot of enhancements as well such as an advanced error handling model, syntax improvements and better functional patterns for programming. These are major selling points for developers and with the minimal ramp up time required to learn the language, most developers prefer Swift to Objective C. Thus, every iPhone mobile application company and iPad application development company is shifting its focus to Swift.

Interesting Facts about Swift 2

With Swift being as popular as it is amongst the mobile development fraternity, here are a couple of interesting facts that lend some perspective as to why developers and companies are flocking towards Swift 2 in recent times.

• Developers who have knowledge of Objective C can learn Swift pretty easily as it is primarily built on Objective C.
• Swift has a dynamic and interesting feature called playground that lets developers see the results live. It is essentially a document wherein code is complied and run live. The best part about this is that it is interactive!
• As already mentioned, it is an open source platform and the community support you can expect from such a platform is unparalleled.
• You can also have Objective C as well as Swift code in your application. In case you require more time to learn Swift, navigate unfamiliar territory using Objective C.

There are many more such fascinating facets to Swift and the hype and hoopla around Swift revolves primarily around its ease of learning, concise syntax and lightening speed. The introduction of Swift has made development on the iOS and OS X platforms much more viable and this could be a game changer in times to come.