Swifton: Ruby on Rails-inspired web framework for Swift

[autoreleasepool]

It seems that, outside of what's used in Cocoa, the Swift language is pretty volatile right now. I would hesitate to commit to a large project that didn't involve the App Store.

[sdegutis]

I think the hope of projects like these is partly to try to advance interest in Swift which draws in more users who then help contribute to making the language more cross-platform, and partly to be f1rst in the project's niche when the language finally crosses that barrier, so that it becomes the de facto standard. (Think Compojure for Clojure, in the same problem domain.)

[PakG1]

My personal hope is that a lot of the long-term risk is mitigated due to IBM's partnership with Apple and alleged goals to use Swift in enterprise. Admittedly, that may not deal with the short-term risk.

[bsaul]

Seems to me like the real challenge in those framework (excepting performance, of course) will be in the orm component. Having a library that can query a db in a typesafe way is a must.

Another will be in the concurrency patterns ( promises ? Coroutines ?, etc).

But i get a great hope that they will succeed. Having a strong open source community will help. In fact, i'm so fed up with the sad state of uikit right now, that i see a brighter future for swift on the server side than on the client. Maybe an android sdk for swift would be a great idea...

[jowiar]

The challenge with any type safe language is interacting with the outside world -- internal consistency is easy, but figuring out how to mediate the non-typesafe outer world is always a bit of a fight. Slick is one swing at the typesafe ORM, but I'm not sure it gets it quite right.

For concurrency, I'd be very intrigued if streams were the first-class concurrency approach -- It's been interesting working with Akka Streams in Scala. They make 90% of concurrency-related things easy and 10% of things seem to be fighting leaky abstractions, but I'd be curious if they were built into the language early on as primitives whether the leaks would go away.

[necolt]

Swift concurrency is interesting topic for sure, looks like language isn't actually built around concurrency unlike other popular new languages these days. Interesting document here about Swift concurrency https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/proposals/Co...

[seivan]

I actually like GCD, so I hope concurrency doesn't make it to the language, or if it does tries to stay as close as it can to GCD api design.

[kawsper]

I wonder if something like Realm.io will be adopted more widely https://realm.io/docs/swift/latest/

They seem to have adoption in some bigger companies, but I don't know if any of them are using the Swift version yet.

[JamoneK]

Have you heard of Zewo and SwiftAndroid?

[protomyth]

I wish Apple had not ditched NeXT's EOF. It would make a fine open source project these days.

[hagmonk]

The project banner depicting a damsel in distress on the railway tracks is going to make some people twitch. I'd avoid that distraction by picking something gender neutral. My 2c.

[PKop]

It's fun. You don't have to get offended. It's just a silly picture. No one was harmed in it's making.

Stop wasting people's time, let them focus on productive aspects of the project.

[mrits]

It is Swift on Rails. If it was Kanye on Rails no one would be offended to see a picture of a man on the railroad.

[henryw]

It's Taylor Swift. Come on.

[whiddershins]

Parent comment is just trying to be helpful, and people are down voting it. The comment points to a legitimate concern so ... like all advice, take it or leave it, but I think it would be gracious to say thanks rather than pile on.

Also you really can't legally use the image of a performer without their permission, if you care abut such things.

[staticelf]

I don't think anyone cares about if a small minority twitches. You don't have to please everyone. In fact, you cannot.

[jakobegger]

For me this was an instant turnoff -- it's really hard for me to take a project serious if that's how they present themselves.

Good software stands on its own, and doesn't need corny jokes like this.

[seivan]

You could have made it better by using protocols for the actions. So the methods for adding routes would ensure that the methods for new and update exists using a where clause checking protocol conformance.

There is potential here, I like a "full" package like "Omakase", granted its built using Swifts strength and a pipeline model like Express.js and/or Rails and its rack middlewares.

[necolt]

Seivan, thanks. Yes, Rails "Omakase" is driving Swifton development.

I'm not sure that protocols will help here, because Swifton supports before/after filter. Could you explain more your idea about how protocols could help here to implement actions with filters?

[Razengan]

I am mainly a hobbyist/newbie that recently started to learn Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. While I like them both, I would prefer to just work in Swift.

How soon does HN expect a Swift-based framework that is comparable to the maturity of Rails, or other powerful frameworks for that matter? Do you think Apple might jump in and introduce one of their own?

[herbst]

Years, if ever. Things like Rails are very major based on the experience of thousands of developers.

[coldcode]

So many of these now. I wonder which one will eventually become the node of Swift.

[fleshweasel]

Node isn't a JavaScript framework so much as a platform to run JavaScript on. Express is maybe more analogous to Swifton here.

[aroman]

Not which; if any, I think.

Node's tight coupling to JavaScript seems like more of an exception than a rule — look at Java, Ruby, Python, etc.

[yeskia]

There's a lot of strings being thrown around for a type-safe language.

[Pxtl]

Hooray for being stringly typed.

[vortico]

Is Swift still OS X-only, or can I use this on Linux?

[supster]

> A Ruby on Rails inspired Web Framework for Swift that runs on Linux and OS X.

[steveklabnik]

The open source release provided the ability to build Swift on Linux.

[harunurhan]

Now I think swift has enough web frameworks and somebody should build an ORM.

[supster]

https://github.com/tannernelson/fluent

[jernfrost]

There seems to be so many web frameworks popping out for Swift, how does this compare with other languages such as C#, Scala and Go?

[muhmi]

So, why would you write systems requiring concurrency and fault tolerance in Swift? What happens when a request explodes? Can it do hot code loading?