Jake Johnson

Web and Mobile App Developer for STEM Premier

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Writing a Swift App With Firebase

Swift is the latest and greatest from Apple for writing iOS and OSX applications. With any luck it will eventually replace Objective-C as the goto language. One doesn’t need to wait though, as one of the banner features of Swift is the ability to include Objective-C code right into your Swift projects. As it turns out it is quite easy to use frameworks that were originally written specifically for ObjC based apps.

Here I’ll walk you through, step-by-step, on how to use a Firebase backend with your app.

Step 1

Open Xcode 6-beta and start a new project. Select Swift as your language of choice.

Step 2

Create a new Objective-C file in your project. When prompted if you would like to include a bridging header, say “yes”. Then, delete the .m file that you created keeping only the bridging-header.h file that was created for you. Add the following line to that file:

import
...

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Don’t leave anything out.

There are nearly endless ways to find information about anything online. As a matter of fact, I am contributing to this mass of knowledge right now. The sheer magnitude of information on every subject can seem to be both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you can find exactly what you’re looking for right away. Yet, other times it feels as if the internet is deliberately keeping secrets, especially when the information you do find falls short in explaining exactly how something works.

I spent the majority of my day today figuring out how to do something seemingly simple. All I wanted to do was make my application use https everywhere. Simple, right? Yes… and no. My application’s backend uses the Play! Framework. Play! allows one to use either Scala or Java (or both) to build your application. Although I am fairly well versed in Java, I am still a bit of a Scala n00b.

My initial strategy...

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