mark-urbanthings/zhenghe

Zheng He

is a toy location search app named for the Chinese explorer Zheng He.

Dependencies Reviewed

• Carthage for package management. It's a popular standard choice right now; I don't have an opinionated preference over, say, CocoaPods.

• SwiftyJSON to slightly ease the pain of JSON parsing. We had to roll our own a year ago, and easy reflection-based JSON is one of the few things I miss from Javaland. It's naturally overkill in this case, but let's pretend this app is supposed to get larger.

• RxSwift and associated libs for reactivity. I haven't developed a strong preference between Rx* and Reactive*; we sadly couldn't use either in our last app, but this has been a great opportunity to exercise one of them a little.

• SwiftLint is run if installed; always handy to have something to yell at you.

Misc Remarks

Being time-constrained, I'd like to acknowledge a few points of good app structure that aren't present here:

• Protocols aren't used to ease dependency stubbing

• UI tests are a very useful and totally absent tool!

• URL construction by string interpolation isn't a great generalizeable pattern.

• External URLs of things like Geonames shouldn't be hardcoded in source code.