App Architecture: iOS Application Design Patterns in Swift

This book explains a range of application design patterns and their implementation techniques using a single example app, fully implemented in five design patterns.

Instead of advocating for any particular pattern, we lay out the problems all architectures are trying to address: constructing the app’s components, communicating between the view and the model, and handling non-model state. We show high-level solutions to these problems and break them down to the level of implementation for five different design patterns — two commonly used and three more experimental.

The common architectures are Model-View-Controller and Model-View-ViewModel + Coordinator. In addition to explaining these patterns conceptually and on the implementation level, we discuss solutions to commonly encountered problems, like massive view controllers.

On the experimental side we explain View-State-Driven Model-View-Controller, ModelAdapter-ViewBinder, and The Elm Architecture. By examining these experimental patterns, we extract valuable lessons that can be applied to other patterns and to existing code bases.

Chris Eidhof is one of the objc.io co-founders, and host of Swift Talk. He also co-authored the Functional Swift and Advanced Swift books. Before, he wrote apps such as Deckset and Scenery. Matt Gallagher works as a software developer and consultant based in Melbourne, Australia; both independently and through his streaming media technologies company Zqueue. Florian Kugler is one of the objc.io co-founders. He worked on Mac Apps like Deckset, co-authored the Functional Swift and Core Data books, and hosts the weekly Swift Talk video series.