Welcome to Kitura!

What is Kitura?

Kitura is a lightweight web development framework written in the Swift programming language. It was developed by a team at IBM and released as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license (the same as Swift itself) in early 2016.

Though Kitura has received continued attention and promotion from Big Blue, Kitura hasn't quite caught the world on fire yet. Perhaps the world does not need Yet Another Web Framework. Even if you decide to use Swift to write your server-side application, Kitura has competition among other Swift web frameworks like Vapor and Perfect. That, and Kitura’s documentation is sort of all over the place, and of uneven quality and coverage among its various sister packages like Kuery (for database connectivity) and Kitura-TemplateEngine (for templating). Well, I can’t fix all those other problems, but I can fix that last one.

Why Kitura?

  • Because Swift is a great programming language. Originally announced by Apple in 2014 to replace the aging, eternally-quirky Objective-C in the Apple ecosystem, it is modern, friendly, sleek, and fun.
  • Because it’s backed by IBM, who perhaps is second only to Apple in terms of adoption and promotion of Swift in the enterprise space. IBM provides Swift application hosting on their cloud platform and is supporting it on their enterprise Linux and Unix operating systems like PowerLINUX and z/OS - seriously heavy iron stuff. IBM is likely to continue supporting Swift and Kitura for the foreseeable future.
  • As Swift is a compiled language, web applications written in Kitura will generally run much faster than those written in scripting languages like PHP, Python, Perl, or Ruby (though things like opcode caches for those languages can close the gap when used).

Why Not Kitura?

  • Because Kitura and Swift in general is still rather new, you may occasionally run into libraries and such which do not yet have great Swift support. While this isn’t such a problem if you’re the type that doesn’t mind writing code to integrate Swift with C or C++ libraries (and I’m definitely not one of those people), it’s still more work to do.
  • Kitura is a very low-level framework, along the lines of Laravel or Ruby on Rails, so while it’s very quick to implement something like a REST interface that provides JSON responses for consumption by, say, a client app on iOS, building something like a blog will take considerably more work than it would using a more full-featured web framework or content management system like WordPress, Drupal, or Alfresco. That being said, building full-featured web sites with Kitura is certainly possible, as later examples in this book will show.
  • Because compiling Swift code is currently not widely supported outside of macOS, Ubuntu Linux, and the IBM operating systems mentioned above. Most notably, Windows support is missing, and I sincerely hope there are some people from Apple and/or Microsoft and/or IBM working on that. There are unofficial ports of Swift to Windows and other Linux flavors, as well as FreeBSD, but your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of these systems.

What You Should Know

This book makes some assumptions about what you already know about software development and the workings of the web. Please review the list below. If anything in the list is unfamiliar to you, I suggest you bone up on those things before diving deep into this book.

  • Software development with Swift. Though this book will periodically teach or review certain aspects of Swift which may be unexpected or unusual for those not strongly familiar with it, it is not intended as a thorough introduction to Swift programming. At the least, you should have read Apple’s The Swift Programming Language book, though I’ll accept just reading the “A Swift Tour” section of the book if you’re already familiar with contemporary object-oriented programming languages such as C# or Java. You should already have Swift installed on your development machine and know how to build and run a basic command-line application. You do not need to be an experienced iOS or macOS developer; in fact, if you are, there’s actually probably a few things you will need to unlearn to become an effective Kitura developer. See the CLI Swift for Cocoa developers appendix for more information if this applies to you.
  • General knowledge about HTTP. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is how web clients and web servers talk to each other. You should know about the different parts of a URL. You should know the meaning and usage of common HTTP status codes like 200 OK and 404 Not Found, as well as common client and server HTTP headers.
  • HTML. The Hypertext Markup Language is how a simple text file can be interpreted by a web browser as a functional web page. You should know common HTML tags and page structure. Earlier chapters in this book will not deal with server responses in HTML, but later ones will.
  • SQL and associated concepts. Structured Query Language is used by relational database systems such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or Microsoft SQL Server to read and manipulate data. You should understand common database structures such as tables, rows, and columns.
  • Swift Package Manager. This is the modern way to add “packages” of additional code to your project. As I expect a major part of the audience of this book will be Cocoa developers who are familiar with using CocoaPods or Carthage for this purpose, this book includes an appendix chapter introducing SPM. Additionally, you should understand the concept of semantic versioning; the appendix will cover this as well.
  • Git. You should have Git installed on your development server, as this is how Swift Package Manager will fetch packages. Ideally, you have some experience with using Git yourself and basic concepts of version control systems. If you wish to use a different version control system for your sites, that’s fine, but the chapter in this book on creating middleware will involve creating a new Swift Package Manager package, which requires experience with Git.

Other Learning Resources

If you don’t like this book or just want a few more long-form tutorials for Kitura, here are some to consider.

  • Server-Side Swift is another e-book that covers Swift; this one is by Paul “twostraws” Hudson, who has written several books on Swift development. At US$40, Hudson’s book is certainly more pricey than this one, but in both cases you probably get what you paid for… I haven’t read Server-Side Swift myself, but I’ve read one of Hudson’s other books and found it to be pretty high-quality stuff.

  • David Okun, Developer Advocate at IBM, has posted two entry-level articles at RayWenderlich.com: Kitura Tutorial: Getting Started with Server Side Swift, which covers basic REST responses and CouchDB database integration (the latter of which is not covered in this book), and Kitura Stencil Tutorial: How to make Websites with Swift, which covers templating with the Stencil templating engine.

  • Like blogs? I suggest adding the Swift@IBM Blog to your feed reader of choice. Its updates are sporadic, but often content-rich.

  • If you like to learn with video, LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) has released a video series entitled Learning Server-Side Swift Using IBM Kitura. You can watch the first couple videos in the series without needing an account. LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com subscriptions can be pricey, but both offer you free one-month trial subscriptions.

Getting Help

You are not alone. As you go along, if you get stumped by something, don’t hesitate to reach out for help and clarification.

The Swift@IBM team site has a public Slack instance. (Slack is a feature-rich yet resource-intensive chat application targeted towards teams and workgroups.) There are several channels including #kitura specifically for Kitura discussion and #general which is good for general discussion about Swift development and other topics in the ecosystem. You can find me there under the username “nocturnal.” Feel free to reach out to me if you’re having any trouble with something in this book.

If Slack’s not your thing, you can also join the Freenode IRC network. It doesn’t have any Kitura-specific channels currently (unfortunately), but it does have the #swift-lang channel which is great for general Swift discussion; there’s lots of smart people there. There may be other Swift-related channels in the IRC universe, but I like the Freenode network because its focus on open-source software means that if you need help with any other open-source (and some not-so-open-source) software you use throughout the day, you can probably find a channel related to it on Freenode. If you’re a Cocoa developer, the #iphonedev and/or #macdev channels may also be of interest; #iphonedev-chat is a fun channel for off-topic banter with others in the community. On Freenode, you can find me using the “_Nocturnal” alias. Again, feel free to reach out and say hi!

The official Swift forums have a Kitura category. As I write this, the category is still fairly new and hasn’t seen much activity; also, I find the forum system that they are using to be quite confusing and borderline unusable. Nonetheless, forums are often a better place to ask long-form questions than the chat-based systems listed above.

Finally, don’t forget about the GitHub issue queues on most projects hosted there. They’re generally intended for reporting bugs and such, but you’re generally welcome to ask for help with usage there too.

Notably Absent Topics

There are some topics that this book does not currently cover, but perhaps should. (Perhaps it will in future revisions.) I list them here so that you may peruse these topics on your own, should you so desire, as well as explain why I omitted them.

kitura create

kitura create is an optional CLI tool which can be used in place of swift package init to start a new Kitura project. It can automatically add the Kitura dependency to your project as well as insert boilerplate code into your project based on your answers to some questions it asks you.

I ultimately decided not to cover this tool in this book because it is written in Node.js, and that's a rather large dependency to install for those that don't already have it (why the authors of this tool chose to write something in JavaScript when they could have chosen Swift itself is beyond me); also, I feel that it is very important to learn how to do “by hand” the things that this tool does for you, such as defining router paths.

Swift-Kuery-ORM

Kuery is a package for integrating with SQL-based database management systems. The chapter on Kuery and following chapters use Kuery as a rather thin interface between the application and the underlying SQL engine - just a step up from writing direct SQL queries, really. Swift-Kuery-ORM abstracts things further by basically letting you save and load objects themselves directly to and from the database, at least from the perspective of your app - of course things are still ending up as SQL queries at the very bottom, but manually breaking objects down into insert or update queries or building them back up from the result of select queries is handled for you.

I didn't cover Swift-Kuery-ORM as I personally am more familiar with using databases without ORM tools. However, as using an ORM is quite common in some ecosystems, I can appreciate that some experienced web developers may be more comfortable using them than not. Thus, I may add coverage of Swift-Kuery-ORM in the future, once I improve my own familiarity with it.

Automated Testing

Automated testing is an important concept in ensuring software quality and avoiding bugs and functionality regressions as software evolves. Kitura and its related packages have rather good automated tests, and I encourage anyone building a “production-ready” project in Kitura also implement automated testing - especially if that project is intended to be a package used by others.

However, automated testing is a rather broad and complex topic, and for Kitura projects it can be doubly complex since the test has to both run the server part of it as well as the client part, ensuring the server is returning the appropriate responses. I ultimately decided that this all was just too complex to cover competently in what is intended to be an introductory-level, wide-but-shallow Kitura tutorial. But perhaps my mind will be changed in the future.

Deploying

Okay, so you’ve written a great Kitura web app, and it runs fine on your local machine; now how do you get that up and running on the public internet? There are many options, from IBM’s own Bluemix cloud hosting service to using Docker containers to simply just building the app as normal and letting it go. The latter is my preferred method, though I know it’s pretty much unheard of in today’s Linux container culture.

Given that wide variance in how things can be deployed, and all the various complexity that goes along with such things, I haven’t decided on a way to cover it just yet.

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