"iOS 8" entries
Translating your Objective-C project to Swift
A step-by-step approach to using Swift with Objective-C.
If you’ve got an existing app written in Objective-C, migrating it into Swift is an excellent exercise for learning Swift, experimenting with Swift, and deciding whether to adopt Swift on a full-time basis. I’ve performed this migration with several real apps, so here are some tips culled from my actual experience.
Hybrid targets
You’re surely not going to translate all your code into Swift at once; you’re much more likely to translate one class at a time. As soon as you add a Swift file to your Objective-C app target, you’ve got a hybrid target: some classes are written in Swift, while other other classes are written in Objective-C. Thus, declarations in each language will need to be visible to the other language. Before you start, it’s a good idea to understand how this visibility works.
Recall that an Objective-C class declaration is conventionally spread over two files: a header file (.h) containing the @interface section, and a code file (.m) containing the @implementation section. If a .m file needs to know about a class, it imports the corresponding .h file.
Visibility of Swift and Objective-C to one another depends upon this convention: it works through .h files. There are two directions of visibility, and they must be considered separately.
Multipeer Connectivity on iOS 8 with Swift
Discover, connect, and transmit data between devices.
Multipeer Connectivity is a means of identifying and connecting services together, and allows for very easy passing back and forth of data with minimal setup. If you are thinking that this seems similar to Bonjour, you are correct; however, Bonjour is for service discovery, not connection or transmission. Multipeer Connectivity handles everything in one neat package.
Multipeer Connectivity is comprised of a few different components, but it works by having applications advertise their services asking if anyone is available to connect. The service browser listens for these advertisements and can request to create a connection between the devices. If the connection is accepted, a session is created with every one inside the session being represented by a peer object.
To demonstrate how this works, we’ll make a simple chat application using Swift, Apple’s new language.