My path as a Developer. Swift and iOS
October 10, 2020
After the successful development and integration of our management system I had to move forward, and the next step was to learn a real coding! Fortunately it was end of the year with two major upcoming holidays - New Year and Chinese New Year, which meant I had a good opportunity to explore something new. As you remember from my previous post we have chosen FileMaker to build the system, so although it provides many client side applications, they were usually tend to be used internally therefore we were to develop something for our customers.
Before we go further, you should understand that despite the experience gained during the development, FileMaker hid all the complexity of communication between a client and server. In other words you just have to enter the IP address or domain of your server and you are in. I struggled a few days thinking of best approach to create an easy solution for our customers in short period. Somehow I decided to create an iOS app first. After 10 minutes of search iOS Development course from Mark Price was chosen and just at that time Udemy offered a decent discount all over the platform. By the way, it was the year when Apple has introduced their Swift programming language. So I started to watch that course simultaneously “mimicking” author’s code and working on my application.
Looking at myself from the past I ask myself why did I choose Swift as a first programming language, why it wasn’t Go, Javascript or Python? Swift was so confusing, hard and complex with its abstraction. Yes, Java, C++, C# have same complexity in syntax, they are all about deep knowledge of high level concepts, interfaces, protocols, thus I would not recommend any of above to newcomers as me in the past. In addition, it is impossible not to mentions weak, strong and unowned references. “What the heck are they?”. Nevertheless, I have finished in 2 weeks, read the documentation on Swift, asked a few questions on StackOverflow and just wrote the code. It took about 2 months to get things done. Application was composed of about 10 or 12 layouts. Users could authenticate using login and password provided by me (Don’t mention a security, please, I have learned a lot since then!), then they were able to browse their shipments, billings, warehouse entries and photos. Functionality was quite simple, but it worked very well, it was easy to use, it has solved the problem of getting real-time information right from your smartphone. Goal was achieved!
Our iOS application was updated and maintained for merely 2 years, after which I have designed and created a successor, more functional and generally better solution – a web application based on VueJS and Golang, but I will talk about it next time.