Is Swift Ready for Enterprise Solutions?
IBM says: “Swift is now ready for the enterprises.”
Swift is Apple’s brand-new programming language for writing great iOS apps. It is the future of iOS application development. Since its launch in 2014, Swift has been the topic of discussion. More and more iOS app developers and companies in New York are returning to Swift which is considered to be the future of all enterprise application development. With the new product in the market, enterprise developers and commercial programmers alike are looking at how to move new applications into iOS platforms.
As Swift is an open source, it is being adopted at a very rapid pace. The platform is significantly for enterprises, especially businesses that have made an investment in Apple’s platforms. There have been several advanced innovations in recent years, similar to the ones like IoT, Cloud Computing and Big Data bringing very fast changes all through the digital world, quite similar to app development in Swift.
Since the launch of this new programming language, app development in Swift has always been a hot topic of discussion among enterprises. It has a higher quality code, is easier to maintain and has a very good performance level. After its launch in 2014, Apple’s new language has the potential to become the effective coding language for creating immersive, responsive, consumer-facing enterprise applications. Tim Cook described the new SWIFT as being the “the next big programming language…..for the next 20 years.” Apple has recorded 850 downloads a second via the app store, all of this is good news for iOS app developers.
An IBM study showed – 42% of executives said that by strategically adopting hybrid cloud solutions, it can enhance operational efficiency and facilitate innovation.
What makes app development in Swift interesting?
What makes Swift interesting is that it is an extremely modern language that has well-defined features and design elements. Swift has an elegant strong safety, and is extremely fast, owing to its heritage derived from the LLVM compiler project. Moreover, it has many interesting features for iOS app developers, i.e. error-handling system, Optionals, and Swift’s adherence to protocol-oriented architecture. Do you still use Objective-C for developing apps, then you should switch to Swift, as soon as possible? With the drive to increase employee productivity, enterprises in New York will likely accelerate their native iOS development plans in the years to come.
Since Apple released the language to open source last December, Big Blue has become one of the largest users of Swift for application development. It was the first Cloud provider to enable the development of applications in native Swift.
IBM Bluemix Runtime makes Swift ready for Enterprises
Bluemix is IBM’s cloud platform, where you can host and integrate services. IBM had recently announced the IBM Bluemix Runtime for Swift, a production-ready Swift runtime on the IBM Cloud for public, dedicated and local deployments. With this release, IBM has made Swift ready for enterprise development. With this platform, enterprises can now build next generation apps in Swift on both client and server-side in the IBM Cloud. IBM is assisting to help grow Swift as a server-side language, thus popularizing app development in Swift.
IBM says that by offering up more cloud-ready Swift tools, it is “breaking down barriers between
front-end and back-end development, which can provide enterprises a single language
to build rich experiences and back-end business logic.”
Swift 3.0 goes Server-side
The Swift 3.0 release was incredibly important as it means enterprise app developers will be able to build next generation apps in Swift from end-to-end, client-side to server-side – on the IBM Cloud. This has only been possible by Apple’s decision to make Swift open-source. In layman’s term, it makes possible for iOS app developers to create apps for iPhone and smartwatch and also the server-side apps using the same programming language.
IBM’s full suite of Swift tools – the IBM Swift Package Catalog, Kitura web framework, and IBM Cloud Tools for Swift – all are Swift 3.0 compliant. Recently, app development in Swift has become extremely popular, being a good enterprise choice for IBM apps. Since Swift moved to open source, IBM has been contributing to server-side efforts. By opening up Swift, Apple has enabled a bigger community to get really innovative with Swift. App development in Swift sees a new opportunity opening up for people to create a more powerful digital experience. Swift on the server has been a popular topic at Swift and iOS community events – thanks to the industry leaders such as IBM.
Key benefits of Enterprise App development in Swift
Ever since the initial reveal, it has proved to be an overall, simpler, smarter programming language, one that can create a more direct and meaningful connection between iOS app developers, brands and end users.
- Swift ideal for Cloud: Swift requires less code and provides high performance, while using less memory – thus making it ideal for cloud development and deployment.
- Speed advantages for Enterprise apps: Swift provides various speed advantages during development, in turn saving on cost. Its performance approaches the one of C++ which is considered the fastest algorithm for calculation of arithmetics.
- A multi-faceted language: Swift is considered a multi-faced programming language as it allows iOS app developers to develop all types of apps, include commonly used enterprise apps.
- Swift is Open source: Initially created for Apple platform; it is slowly expanding to build on Linux. There is also an initiative to make Swift Android-compatible. Open sourcing of core libraries enables iOS app developers to develop efficient contextual enterprise apps which result in enhanced employee productivity and streamlined business processes.
- Swift supports Dynamic Libraries for fast loading: Generally, enterprise apps take more time to load as they are big in size. As app development in Swift uses dynamic libraries, apps are directly uploaded in the memory – ultimately increasing the app performance.
Swift is the future for Enterprises
Objective-C has been around for 30 years. Swift is the future and delivers direct ways to the development community to influence a language that will be used for developing enterprise applications and apps. The main advantage of Swift is that it will make porting of iOS apps to Android easier. The iOS app developers are familiar with the resilient and brief Swift code and follow the best practices of app development in Swift – to create a wide range of apps. As soon as Swift came out two years ago, iOS app developers from all over the world fell in love. Swift is easy to learn, fast, powerful, modern, safe, and clearly the way of the future.
Wrapping Up
Apple and IBM having joined their efforts gave that much need boost to Swift, to make it popular. IBM Cloud gives opportunities not only to develop and deploy but also to share Swift resources and use Swift Sandbox for quick experiments.
By unlocking Swift for use in the enterprise, IBM reached another milestone in their shared journey with Apple to help enterprises advance their mobile strategy. IBM is excited by the opportunities Swift presents and looks forward to helping enterprises realize the productivity benefits – when developing next generation apps. With app development in Swift, companies have identified a huge scope in developing enterprise applications with multiple functionalities that enhance and satisfy customer needs and generate maximum revenue. Successful app development in Swift – has made it a preferred language for enterprise use, and hence this new programming language is used by most companies. You must have commonly seen this line ‘Time to Shift to Swift – The future of Enterprise Application Development”.