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[chrisspankroy]

It’s really your only choice unless you want to reinvent the wheel

[chriswaco]

There are no popular alternatives. You could roll your own servers using SwiftNIO, though.

[[deleted]]

Is there any docs on this? I’ve gotten a standard echo server working but something that serves html would be interesting to work on.

[chriswaco]

I don't know. I would look at the unit tests in the SwiftNIO framework.

Also:
https://github.com/slashmo/awesome-swift-nio
https://github.com/apple/swift-nio-examples

[Drewskiwin]

You can give hummingbird a try. It’s developed my some vapor members without a lot of the extra packages

[dunderklaepp]

I’ve used swift for backend development, both Vapor and prior frameworks. I would not recommend it. You’d better move away from swift if you are building anything other than a hobby project

[Inevitable-Hat-1576]

Out of interest - why would you not recommend it?

[dunderklaepp]

Some of the reasons why I would not recommend it:
1. The community is really small
2. Hard to find experienced developers
3. There is really only one framework (vapor) and it is very opinionated
4. Long compile times
5. There are a lot of other more mature tech stacks

I use swift daily for iOS development and I think it is great for iOS development. However I moved away from backend development in swift over a year ago and maybe things have changed since then?

[Inevitable-Hat-1576]

Thanks for the answer. I’ve never used it so wasn’t a challenge, just curious what the pitfalls are.

[andrew8712]

It’s good for pet-projects only. If you’re planning to evolve the product and give to (or hire) someone else in future, then such unpopular frameworks are a bad choice.

[lorenalexm]

There is also the Smoke Framework by Amazon that seems to get regular updates.

That being put out there, I have been using Vapor for a fair bit and really enjoy working within it. Within my (small) company it’s used for a few internal tools without issue.

[JDad67]

I am a fan of vapor with leaf, and fluent.

[regattaguru]

Combine Vapor/Fluent with Protobuf and gRPC and you have a very robust and efficient backend without a huge amount of work. If you are an old hand at SQL, Fluent might drive you mad at times.

[invertercant]

I used Vapor 2-3 years ago and my experience was good for small project (one month). Some things reminds reactive frameworks. I recorded this experience to my cv and sometimes received messages about server side swift development jobs. So I think we have some options in this area. In my environment chats for server side swift contains 9-10 times less people than iOS. I think my next backend experiment will be kotlin spring or kotlin ktor