The goal of this project is to develop a sample iOS application using swift's most commonly used libraries. The iOS application connects to a mocked backend provided by the Jsonplaceholder service. The libraries that I'm going to discuss here cover the most common tasks from networking to custom layout implementation. In this sample project, I will use some of the libraries discussed here.
The libraries can be categorized into three sections. First, the libraries that are purely related to ReactiveX ; you may want to check the link for more information about the API and its operators that handle asynchronous data streams through functional programming. Then, the libraries used for performing asynchronous http requests, downloading and caching, managing a local data store and building forms. Finally, the libraries related to custom layout implementation.
RxSwift is the implementation of ReactiveX for the swift programming language.
RxCocoa is part of RxSwift. It provides a reactive API extensions to the user interface components of the Cocoa API.
It's true that you could bind your Rx observables to your table and collection views using RxCocoa. However, you will need RxDataSources for the collection and table views that use sections by conforming your data objects to the SectionModelType
protocol.
RxGestures provides an API to the user interface's view object to respond to the user's gestures reactively.
One of the common tasks involved in implementing iOS applications is to perform http requests to some provided web services. Moya helps you write your http requests in an abstract and a concise way. So, you won't need to keep on writing boilerplate code. For more information, check the library's documentation.
Moya-ObjectMapper is used to serialize your Moya's API JSON responses to actual objects. So, you won't need to serialize your object from a JSON dictionary.
Eureka is a library that helps you implement forms using a tableview under the hood. It provides custom operators to help you build your form and also provides a built-in validation API.
Kingfisher is a library used to fetch and cache your downloaded images. In case you are an Android developer, it is similar to Picasso.
LayoutKit is an alternative to auto-layout that was implemented by LinkedIn for performance reasons.
SnapKit is an API that helps you declare auto-layout constraints programmatically.
Realm mobile database is a very fast local database and it is an alternative to SQLite and Core Data.
Chameleon is a flat color framework that helps you theme your iOS application easily.
So, I hope that I was able to present the libraries in a concise and in an appropriate way. I encourage you to check the sample app to see an example of how some of these libraries work together. For more information, I suggest that you check the libraries' official documentation that I provided here.
Note: I believe that this is not the most appropriate architecture to build iOS applications. So, using an MVVM design pattern will be more appropriate.
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