Swift Taking the Front Seat in Mobile Development

Since Swift’s unveiling last week at Apple’s WWDC, a plethora of learning information has been released by Apple along with other authors and developers. The Swift Programming Language is available with iBooks on the Mac or iOS device, and through iTunes.

If you missed the conference, Swift is a programming language optimized for mobile that builds on the fundamentals of C and the widely used Objective-C without what Apple described as ‘constraints’ of C compatibility. It’s the new language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, the frameworks for building software on iOS and it’s readily compatible with existing Objective-C code. Swift takes the best parts of C and Objective-C, like flow control and operators, and takes object-oriented features like classes, to give developers the environment they need to program their best applications without needing to relearn a whole new language. Swift’s inferred types make code clean and easy to read while being less error-prone, memory is automatically managed, modules eliminate headers and even provide namespaces, one can even name emoticons as variables. You can see your program come to life in the interactive playground, or watch your loop progress with the timeline assistant.

Swift has been ready for implementation since its announcement and, again, is readily compatible with existing applications written in Objective-C. You can begin integration now and have applications ready for release with iOS8 and Apple’s new OS, Yosemite. Xcode6 is in beta and available for download for free, while tutorials for integration of Swift with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are also available!