Vapor 3 and a few random experiments

This past week I dug more deeply into server-side swift, specifically with Vapor 3. Vapor was interesting because it recently built over SwiftNIO, and initial reports of its performance were very positive. A highly performant HTTP application based framework in a memory safe language? Worth a look!

I have used dynamically typed languages (NodeJS/TypeScript/Javascript and Python) for quite a while, so the biggest shock is transferring back towards the constraints of a strictly typed language. This cascades into how the software is represented at a lot of levels, and really the transfer to “classes, structs, and enums” was the hardest to re-acquaint myself. The piece that feels the weakest (compared to other languages and frameworks) is the testing – the dynamic languages uses the full capabilities of the languages dynamism, and it’s brutally missing from swift. I have become immensely spoiled using testing frameworks like Jasmine, or Mocha and Chai with supertest over express, making a super-easy to read testing framework that works the code directly.

Speaking of BDD, I took a day detour into even trying to use Quick and Nimble, but in the end decided it was more pain than value – and leveraging XCTest, even if writing tests with it felt stunted and somewhat awkward, was a more robust path. It was particularly painful to work with server-side swift, it seems far more robust with IOS projects – but the lack of reflection and XCTest identifying what to run on Linux is atrocious. When I found the SwiftPM command to help collect the tests with XCTest:

swift test --generate-linuxmain

that won the day, and it was back to XCTest.

Vapor 3 itself was very straightforward, although the docs are very rough – and in some cases downright useless. There are multiple points where extensions to Vapor (WebSocket, Auth, and so forth) are not clear on how you attach and use them in their templates and sample code. Fortunately the community (on Discord, rather than Slack and Vapor on StackOverflow) makes up for the difference. The developers who are actively pushing Vapor forward as well as community members are very accessible and willing to answer questions.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m finding the idioms of programming with swift the hardest to get my head around. It is a very different way of thinking about the problem and how to solve it, tending to be fully specified at every level. Structs, extensions, and enums make up most of the structures, often with lots of smaller files in the examples that I’ve been seeing so far.

While it’s very straight forward to read and understand, I find myself struggling to know where to look things up, and how to read documentation to get what I need out of it. In addition, even Apple’s documentation seems significantly weaker than it has in years past. There’s a new style to the documentation that I’m struggling to learn – the ability to read the docs to know what enumeration options should be used, how and when, is definitely a challenge. It is often Q&A and samples in StackOverflow that provide the closing hints or how to use the code in any holistic way that makes a difference.

On the good side, Xcode running Vapor on my laptop was a gem, and I was immediately enthralled with the cpu and memory tracking details that you could see while running the code locally. I haven’t fully explored what you can do, but even just seeing the live CPU and memory tracking on the Vapor application while it’s running is wonderful. In other environments, there would be a lot of infrastructure setup to capture that same level of immediate detail – and it’s just built in with Xcode.

Vapor makes it easy to leverage Xcode, wrapping the SwiftPM tool commands so you can invoke something akin to:

vapor xcode -y

This will regenerate an Xcode project file and open it. Vapor projects also have a number of examples of wrapping the code into a container to run however you like, and the next version of Vapor (4, in development now) will have some “polite shutdown” signal handlers for SIGINT and SIGTERM, which will make it work better with orchestration systems like Kubernetes.

I have this perverse idea of wanting to run this same code that I can put into a container on an IOS device for a quick-shot “mobile server”. Yes – I know there are issues with IOS and activating the relevant devices through SwiftNIO, but the idea of having my own portable server as an IOS app is really appealing.

Vapor 3 is all based on Swift Package Manager, for which there’s no (yet) direct Xcode support. It looks like it may be possible to use Xcode’s cross-project linking to have an SPM based Xcode project working with a more classic IOS one using the project as a dependency. There’s an article on how this can work called Bringing Swift NIO to the iPhone, and a similar reference, a walk-through how-to in the swift forums. I haven’t wrapped my sample Vapor 3 project into an IOS application yet, but I’ll be giving that a shot shortly.