BaasBox is a tool that allows you to quickly build a backend for an application. The getting started guide for using BaasBox is a little dated and written entirely in Objective-C. The tutorial is fine, but since I’m working in Swift day to day the application I was looking to build would also be in Swift.
My first thought was to just google around and find newer tutorials. I found a single post that seemed relevant, Swifing with BaasBox - Building a quiz app with BaasBox Rather than lose all hope I decided that porting the tutorial app to Swift might be a good exercise in BaasBox and might give me an idea if I liked the tool.
I cloned the starter project and created a swift branch started hacking away.
Next was the brute force method of including the BaasBox SDK:
- Downloaded the SDK and dragged the “BaasBox-iOS-SDK” folder onto the root of the project.
- Created a bridging header to allow swift to import Objective-C source. Go to File -> New -> File -> iOS -> Header File. The naming is very specific, it should be ‘[ProjectName]-Bridging-Header.h’.
- In Swift files you can now import BaasBox
The latest SDK and the skeleton project were on different versions so I needed to change some of the tests to get the project to compile.
From there I stepped through and converted each class from Objective-C to Swift. They were straight forward and I was expecting more difficulty. This gets us to the beginning of the tutorial, in the next post we’ll actually implement the tutorial in Swift.