Tag: Swift
Universal/Isomorphic React on a Swift Backend
React’s standard flow is to start with an empty HTML template from the server, and populate the DOM entirely on the client. Letting React pre-render the initial HTML for your app on the server before the client takes over has some advantages, though: it lets slower (mobile) clients load your app much faster, and it’s good for SEO for search engines that don’t support JavaScript. Since you have to run React on the server to do this, you need a JavaScript-able backend, which is why such Universal (a.
Combining SCons and Ninja builds
After considering several software build systems for Swift a few years ago, we ended up settling on SCons for its correctness, power, and maintainability. The main thing we traded this for was speed: although we could get a no-op build down to only a few seconds by using the right flags, those few seconds can still get in the way when doing very short build/test/debug cycles during daily development. To shorten the turnaround time during development, I created a script to use SCons to generate a build file for Ninja, a small but very fast build system, which gets our no-op builds down to a fraction of a second.
XMPP Scripting with Sluift
Did you ever want to find out what XMPP clients people in your contact list are using? Do you want to migrate your contact list from one server to another, but don’t want to provide your password to some on-line service to do that? Do you have some XMPP-related task you quickly want to write a script for, but don’t want to deal with complex asynchronous APIs? Well, Sluift may be just the thing you are looking for!
Sluift is a Lua-based script layer on top of the Swiften XMPP library. It provides a simple API to do common XMPP tasks, either interactively (through an XMPP console), or by running a script in batch mode. In this post, we’ll go through some examples of what you can already do with Sluift today.
Eclipse CPPUnit Error Parser
I’ve recently been experimenting with using Eclipse CDT as IDE for Swift development. One of the handy things is that Eclipse CDT has support for parsing compiler error messages, allowing you to quickly navigate to the failing source code line by simply clicking on the error message. Although Eclipse CDT supports all the compilers we use for Swift out of the box, I was still missing the easy navigation for fixing failing CPPUnit tests. Since the error parser (just like almost everything else from Eclipse) is extensible, I wrote a small plugin for parsing CPPUnit error messages.
Beautiful (XMPP) Testing
O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as interesting for developers in general, I released my article under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks to the good folks from O’Reilly for encouraging us to do this), which you can find here (or directly from my Git repository).
“Beautiful Testing” XMPP Chapter
Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.