Weekly Sponsor: Buddybuild 🤖🛠

Friday August 18th, 2017

We're very happy to welcome back one of our favorite sponsors again this week. It's buddybuild!

Long time readers will remember that buddybuild is a fantastic mobile continuous integration, delivery, crash reporting and feedback platform, all in one.

Thousands of development teams, like Slack, Meetup and The Washington Post love buddybuild because it's the easiest way to build, test and distribute their mobile applications.

It takes just minutes to set up, let's check it out!

We'll head over to buddybuild.com and click Get Started.

We'll sign up with Github (we could also use Bitbucket, GitLab, or sign up with email / password for repos on any other git server). Neat!

Next, buddybuild will let us choose a git repo to create our first project with.

Once we select the repo we want to build, buddybuild will get to work building our app for the first time.

After that build is complete, our app is set up on buddybuild - it's that easy.

buddybuild installs and configures the necessary web hooks for our project so new builds are triggered whenever code is pushed. It also scans your repo for any tests you might have written, and runs them reliably on the simulator and physical devices.

With buddybuild, we won't need to wait for App Store processing time or reviews before deploying to testers.

buddybuild's continuous deployment system can send our app to users instantly on every build, on a schedule that works for our team, or at the push of a button.

This kind of comprehensive Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment workflow is a game changer for iOS and Android teams. It also means we can have our whole development workflow set up in just minutes. We can also infinitely customize and extend buddybuild so it exactly just the way we want.

Buddybuild's deployment service also handles the process of adding new users (and their devices) by automatically managing UDIDs, iOS provisioning profiles and signing identities. (Fantastic UX for both testers and devs!)

Only buddybuild goes even farther, and gives us a fully integrated feedback platform.

Once users have installed our app and are testing it out, they can send their feedback (along with important diagnostic details) by simply taking a screenshot.

buddybuild also has rich pull request support. We can even pair it up with Danger to automate (the usually tedious) code review processes.

If our team works with pull requests frequently, buddybuild can be configured to build the pull request, then merge, commit, and update the commit status in GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab. This ensures we always know before when a pull request is safe to merge.

If we have Unit Tests or UI Tests for our app, buddybuild will consistently and reliably run them as part of every build and automatically display how much of our codebase is covered by our tests. Neat!

Should a test fail, buddybuild will provide us with a video replay of our test's run and detailed test results to quickly understand the cause of the failure. (Learn more about testing on buddybuild here.)

If our app ever crashes, buddybuild's Source Context functionality will trace back and highlight the exact line of offending source code that caused the crash, telling us which users were affected, and how many times the crash happened.

Each crash is also recorded with an Instant Replay - this is a video replay of our users' actions in the moments leading up to the crash. Never wonder about "steps to reproduce" again! Super cool.

Buddybuild is also a great community citizen, and has our backs as iOS developers. For example, they'll give us a heads up on any potential breaking changes in Xcode. Within 48 hours of any Xcode release (including betas!), buddybuild will automatically takes our most recent successful build, and build and run tests against it using the latest version of Xcode. Then it will email us the results. How cool is that?!

Last but certainly not least, buddybuild not only comes with built-in integrations with tons of services we all know and love like GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, Slack, JIRA Pivotal Tracker, Slack, HipChat but it's also infinitely customizable to meet the exact needs of your development team!

Buddybuild is the real deal, give them a try today at buddybuild.com!

Topics

Swift

#315: Codable Basics 📠

Tuesday August 15th, 2017

Topics

Swift

Swift 4 has brought with it a ton of great improvements. Today we'll cover one of them, it's the new Codable protocol! Codable ships with Swift 4 as part of the Swift standard library and allows us to conform our own types to it to get encoding and decoding functionality "for free".

Encoding and decoding types has never been easier.

Let's dive in!

Before we begin lets back up a second and look at what we're trying to accomplish when it comes to encoding and decoding.

Essentially we want to take an instance of an object or struct and convert (or "encode") it into some other, (usually "machine-readable") format. Then, later, we want to be able to convert (or "decode") the information in that format back into our object or struct.

These days the most common format for encoding/decoding is JSON. It's supported just about everywhere and has the advantage of being both human and machine readable.

For this reason, we'll be discussing JSON in this Bite. It's important to note though, that Codable isn't specific to just JSON. It's built to support encoding and decoding into just about any format we can think of.

In the past, we might have used something like the JSONSerialization class in Foundation to do encode our types into JSON.

This works great, but the encoding input and decoding output was either a Dictionary<String: Any>, or an Array of them. Then we'd need to manually convert to/from our "real" types.

With Codable, we can do much better!

Let's start with a simple struct conforming to Codable:

struct Spaceship : Codable {
  var name: String
}

let ship = Spaceship(name: "Skyhopper")

Now, all we need to do to convert our ship to JSON is:

let data = try? JSONEncoder().encode(ship)

This returns a Data that we can send to a server, store to disk, or do anything else we need with.

Let's convert it to a string real quick so we can take a look at it:

if let string = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) {
  print(string)
}

This prints:

{"name":"Skyhopper"}

Nice! Notice how we didn't need to specify the names of the "keys" in the JSON, they are inferred from the property names on our struct.

For decoding, we can easily go the other way:

let ship = try? JSONDecoder().decode(Spaceship.self, from: data)

Note how both the .encode and .decode functions can throw and thus we're using the try? keyword to return a nil Optional if encoding or decoding fails.

Before we go let's cover one more nice thing about Codable.

Let's add another struct to the mix:

struct Person : Codable {
  var firstName: String
  var lastName: String
}

struct Spaceship : Codable {
  var name: String
  var pilot: Person
}

Nice. Now when we encode a Spaceship, the system notices that the pilot property's value is also Codable and does the right thing for us automatically:

{"name":"Skyhopper", "pilot":{"firstName":"Luke", "lastName":"Skywalker"}}

That's all for today, next time we'll look at using Codable with more complex types of data likes Dates. Happy coding!

Weekly Sponsor: Buddybuild 🤖🛠

Friday July 28th, 2017

This week we're welcoming back one of our favorite sponsors: It's buddybuild!