Top-notch video tutorials for Swift developers

In this episode, we explore parsing strings into structured data using the Swift parsing library from Point Free. We demonstrate how to create composable parsers, starting with a simple example, then build a couple more complex parsers, including one for parsing sample input from Advent of Code and another for parsing CSV data of taxi trips. We'll explore how to use both forms of parsers and lean on composability to build them up.

In this episode, we explore the Swift Clock protocol, particularly the utility in testing and Xcode previews. Clocks are essential for managing time-related functionality in code but can complicate tests and previews by causing delays. By creating custom clocks, developers can control time advancement and sleeping, making tests and previews more efficient. Two custom clocks are implemented: an ImmediateClock and a ScaledClock. These allow you to bypass or scale the delay, allowing for quicker iterations in previews. The Immediate Clock skips delays entirely, while the Scaled Clock speeds up the delay by a specified factor. These custom clocks can also be used in tests to avoid unnecessary waiting, enhancing development efficiency.

Keeping files and databases compatible with changing versions of your code can be challenging. As you add new features to your app, your data modeling needs may change, which can break when processing data created on earlier versions of the app. To handle this, we use migrations, which help migrate the data from one version of the app to another. This episode will show how to accomplish this using a new framework called Monarch.

In this episode we explore a surprising behavior of the task modifier when embedding your SwiftUI views inside of containers that are implemented with UIKit.

In this episode we will introduce Vapor's Queues package and use Redis as our backing storage engine. The performance characteristics of Redis make it a great choice to store work to be processed later. We'll then set up an EmailJob to send a welcome email to new users. We'll also explore how to run these in-process in development as well as separate processes for production. As a final bonus, we'll create a custom Vapor command to test this all out to see how it behaves with many jobs enqueued.

Redis is a popular choice for a key-value store for backend applications. This can be used for a multitude of different reasons, such as caching with automatic expiration, rate limiting based on ip address, leaderboards, pub/sub and much more. Its performance characteristics make it a fantastic choice for queuing systems, which we'll cover soon. In this episode we will set up a redis server in our docker compose file, then integrate it into our Vapor application with a simple middleware to count the number of requests to a given path.

In this episode we will explore supporting JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs. These are a common standard for use in authentication tokens which allows you to support 3rd party authentication providers, token expiration, user metadata and more. These are cryptographically signed and can be verified by the server with a secret. There is also the option to use RSA public/private key pairs to allow clients to verify tokens without going back to the server that signed them. For these reasons JWTs are a really powerful option. Here we will use the Vapor JWT package to provide support for generating and authenticating with HS256 tokens.

In this episode we will explore how to use AsyncRequestAuthenticator types, such as AsyncBasicAuthenticator and AsyncBearerAuthenticator. We’ll see how to compose these to support multiple authentication strategies and how to protect certain routes to require authenticated users.

This episode will introduce a new model for a User that will contain validations to ensure the email address format is correct (using a built-in regular expression) and that the password length is good and secure. We'll also ensure to hash the password with bcrypt before storing it in the database. Finally we'll make a custom Response model for our User so that we don't reveal internal fields to clients.

In this episode, we create a form to create songs from our API by implementing a create route. We use a payload struct to normalize and validate user input for song title and artist name. We also ensure that duplicate artists are not created by using a custom comparison method. Finally, we create the artist and song in the database and return the newly created song. We also configure the JSON output to use snake case instead of camelcase for our default encoder and decoder for our Vapor app.

In this episode, we explore Vapor routing more deeply. We set up a route to fetch a band by its slug, handling async operations and errors. After testing, we refactor with a findBySlug method for reusability. We add a route to fetch songs for a band and discuss avoiding inefficient querying. To organize the code, we create BandsController and SongsController to group routes.

Now that we have our database setup, we can create our models. We'll start by examining the Model and Content protocols, then implement the necessary properties decorated with Fluent's property wrappers to denote primary keys, fields, and foreign keys.

In order to evolve a persistent store over time you have to migrate the data. Fluent, the Vapor Framework that offers ORM support for popular databases, has a solution for this. In this episode we will understand how to write migrations, how to revert them and how to evolve your schema over time without losing data.

Docker is a common choice for running services locally for development as well as server deployment. Vapor comes by default with a working Docker setup, so in this video we will explore how this all works. We'll also explore how to configure the database with Environment variables.

In this episode we cover migrating our Swift Data models between incompatible versions using custom and lightweight migration.

In this episode we will provide a searchable interface using the @Query and #Predicate macros. We'll discuss how to use localizedStandardCompare instead of lowercase and other limitations of predicates. We'll also implement a solution for adding dynamic data to the query.

In this episode we'll create a form to add and edit songs for a given artist. This will lean on the technique we used last time with a small workaround required.

We learn how to build a form in SwiftData. We cover how to use the .sheet modifier to present a new view for creating or editing artist records. We also cover creating the state for the form, presenting the sheet, and creating the form itself. We also implement a scratch model context to ensure that our changes can be discarded if the user taps the Cancel button.

This episode discusses how to work with the ModelContext in a SwiftUI app to insert and delete data. The ModelContext can be accessed through the ModelContainer, which is set up in the environment automatically. The @Query macro is used to retrieve artists from the database and iterate over them. We also implement swipe to delete using the onDelete modifier.

In this episode we will take a look at the new @Model macro, which we can use to decorate our model classes that we want to persist with SwiftData.

SwiftData is a replacement for CoreData, built entirely for Swift. It leverages the underpinnings of Core Data, but is much simpler to work with. In this video we will cover the first 3 main types you'll need to understand: ModelConfiguration, ModelContainer, and ModelContext.

With many great features announced each year, it's easy for smaller changes to go without as much fanfare. In this episode we'll take a look at a new way to format dates using the .formatted() API. It's easy to use, expressive, and best of all we don't need to worry about caching formatters anymore!

In this episode we take a look at the newly announced Swift Testing framework that is currently in preview. This leverages Swift Macros to make tests much more friendly to write, gives you much richer diagnostic information when tests fail, and is generally a welcome improvement over using XCTest. Keep in mind this is a preview at the time of recording and will require a snapshot toolchain of Swift.

Last time we left off where keyboard shortcuts weren't quite working the way we wanted. In this episode we take the time to explore the various options we tried and why they don't work. We address this by implementing a key handling system in AppKit and publishing these as commands to SwiftUI using a Combine subject. This wraps up our series on Building a Mastodon client for macOS!