Swift in the Cloud

CHAPTER 9Over the Horizon: Where Do We Go from Here?

Even though this book was written just two years after the initial release of Swift, this language has made very rapid progress in that short time. It has established a firm beachhead as a client-side language for the Apple ecosystem, and it has contributed to improved quality of developer’s code as well as faster development cycles. Swift has gone from a proprietary language to a fully transparent open source project with a very large and active community supporting its evolution. The 3.0 release of Swift also delivered an initial level of support for the language to be used for server-side (and cloud) software. So now the question is, where do we go from here?

In this chapter, I’ll explore areas of focus for the Swift community for the next major release. I’ll also peer beyond that, to examine longer-term enhancements that I know are necessary to reach the full potential of this exciting new language. As you read about these projects that will improve the story for Swift, perhaps you will be inspired to join the effort and become one of the many contributors to one (or more) of them!

Bringing Swift to the Server

A crucial value proposition for Swift is the concept of fluid migration of Swift code across the client-server (or client-cloud) network divide. There have already been projects where developers with iOS Swift experience have been able to quickly apply their front-end Swift knowledge and skill to back-end Swift ...