At a global level, there is an ever-increasing appetite for data delivered in real time, with WebSockets being probably the most popular transport protocol for such use cases. Before WebSockets came along, the “realtime” web existed, but it was difficult to achieve, typically slower, and was delivered by hacking existing web technologies which were not designed for realtime applications. The WebSocket protocol paved the way to a truly realtime web.
Swift is an open source and general-purpose application programming language developed by Apple. It’s designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch) frameworks across all of the company’s operating systems. Swift is set to become the dominant language for iOS development, progressively replacing Objective-C. Within the Apple developer ecosystem, the WebSocket protocol is made available for Swift as part of the URLSessionWebSocketTask class in the Foundation framework. For low-level WebSocket protocol access, you can also use the Network framework, which provides fine-grained control on WebSocket protocol connection and packet transport, via the NWProtocolWebSocket class.
Since demand for realtime data is growing steadily, and with Swift being a core language for Apple operating systems, I think it’s worth looking at some of the many challenges of implementing a dependable client-side WebSocket solution for Swift apps.
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