During this project I would definitely say that my favorite technology to use would be SwiftUI. I’ve done some Swift programming before in the past but have been doing web development lately. After coming back to it I realize how much I love it! For those of you unfamiliar with Mobile Development let me explain it a bit.
When doing Mobile Development you can develop native applications, which means building an application for a given mobile operating system such as Android or iOS. You also can build mobile apps using cross-platform solutions such as Flutter and React Native. My team and I are currently building a native travel application for iOS. Within the iOS ecosystem there are two frameworks to choose from when building a project: UIKit and SwiftUI. UIKit is the tried and true framework that most companies are still using and will continue to use for the next few years. SwiftUI is the new kid on the block and the future of iOS development. We are still years away from SwiftUI becoming the de facto way for building iOS applications, but it is still very essential/fun to learn. My team and I decided we wanted to be ready for the future so we chose to develop with SwiftUI.
What I love so much about SwiftUI is how easy it is to build beautiful interfaces. There are times when I HATEEE building out UIs in web development because I have to fight with CSS, and there are so many different options out there to choose from between Tailwind, Bootstrap, as well as all the other different frameworks that you can use that could one day just not be useful anymore. I always struggle building out UIs in web dev, but with SwiftUI it is so easy. SwiftUI takes a declarative approach to programming meaning you tell the views what you want them to do and SwiftUI handles the rest.
Unfortunately, because SwiftUI is still relatively new, there are still certain things that you cannot do with SwiftUI that is a walk in the park for UIKit. Therefore, there are times when you much use some UIKit functionality and integrate it with SwiftUI in order to get certain outcomes that you desire in your application. Hopefully in the future Apple will get SwiftUI to a point where developers will no longer have to rely on functionality from UIKit and can use 100% SwiftUI to build out entire applications. I feel that I would like to specialize in iOS Mobile Development, so I definitely hope that after this semester I can secure a job as an iOS developer. That would be great!
Anyways, thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day (or night wherever you are)!
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