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IBM has announced that it is bringing Apple's Swift development language to the cloud to simplify end-to-end development of enterprise apps. Swift will be available as a server-side language on IBM Cloud, and today's phase of the rollout includes a preview of a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog.
Developers can start exploring the benefits of Swift on the IBM Cloud in three ways:
- Experiment in the Swift Sandbox: Quickly experiment with open sourced Swift, ramp up your skill set and learn what Swift can do for your enterprise by checking out new enhancements to the Swift Sandbox.
- Develop and Deploy: Start building end-to-end applications on Bluemix and quickly deploy them with Kitura, a new open source web server released by IBM, on both OSX and Linux.
- Share Swift Resources: Leverage code across projects by creating packages and submitting them to the Swift Package Catalog on Bluemix to encourage sharing of new Swift resources with the global developer community.
Apple and IBM announced an enterprise partnership in July 2014, released the first ten MobileFirst for iOS apps by year end and have launched new apps periodically since. MobileFirst for iOS apps are designed in a secure environment, and can easily be deployed, managed and upgraded through IBM cloud services.
Apple and IBM list all of the MobileFirst for iOS apps on their websites.
Top Rated Comments
If you got really good at swift it would let you write native apps, and then write any required backend in the same language. That really helps at being an expert at something.
Also having the cloud service backed by IBM, which also uses the same backend for their enterprise apps, lets you put your trust into it - less likely to have a situation like Parse.
This is all positive news.
This is really interesting. I'd kind of assumed that regardless of open source, Swift wouldn't have many use cases outside of iOS. Am quite happy to see that potentially not being true.