An object-functional microframework for developing FCGI applications in Swift
Well, the title pretty much says it all. This is a microframework (no, I'm not writing the next Django or Rails), and it is written in Swift (well, OK, I admit, there is a little bit of Objective-C in here because I saw no need to throw out the perfectly good piece of work that is GCDAsyncSocket).
A valid question. Mostly because I was bored last weekend. Also, because I am passionate about a couple of things. First, I love Swift. Call me an Apple fanboy, but I'm a huge fan of the language and think they hit the nail on the head. Second, I love lasers, but that's not important right now. Third, I am a huge supporter of functional (and similar derived styles) of programming. Fourth, I think that Swift is going to (eventually) bring functional programming within reach of the "normal" programmer who can't convince his boss to let him rewrite the company intranet in some arcane Haskell framework (which would be crazy awesome, but might not be maintainable by your average kid out of school; Swift OTOH is). I'm already starting to write iOS apps in a functional style thanks to Swift, and it's AWESOME. Which leads me to the final reason that I will bore you with: I hate programming web apps. I did it for way too many years. It scarred me for life. But I may be convinced to go back at some point after my JavaScript hangover wears off and I can write server-side code in a framework that is not bloated and works well with a functional approach.
SwiftCGI will eventually become a mature, modular microframework that encourages a functional approach to developing web apps in Swift. The design will be as modular as possible so that "pieces" can be assembled to form a fuller framework as desired. Eventually, it will have an ORM API (still hashing out the design decisions there so that it will work well with both relational and non-relational databases) and a few other niceties, but don't expect this to have as many features as Django.
I would currently classify SwiftCGI as alpha status in that it is a funcitonal base that exhibits proper modular design, is (mostly) unit tested, but is still rather incomplete. It is not ready for prime time yet, so expect things to change very rapidly over the next few months. (NOTE: The current server has the same limitations of FCGIKit, which will be remedied in the future).
I'm not sure I'd say this project was "inspired" by FCGIKit, but the core of this project started as a port of (and is still heavily influenced by) FCGIKit. I started off by porting FCGIKit to Swift, and have since rewrittena lot of things to be more "Swifty." I chose this path because I 1) don't want to re-invent the wheel, and 2) felt it would be a lot safer to have a pure Swift FCGI server implementation rather than wrapping the FCGI C library shudder.
- Clone the repo
- Open the SwiftCGI Demo workspace
- Get ticked at Apple for breaking command-line app integration with third-party Frameworks (currently the demo is a full-blown Cocoa app with a totally useless window lol)
- Switch the target to SwiftCGIDemo if necessary
- Run the project
- Configure nginx to serve fcgi from your application (a full nginx tutorial may come later if I get bored, but for now, the following nginx.conf snippet should suffice... Put this inside your server block)
location /cgi {
fastcgi_pass localhost:9000;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
BSD license. TL;DR - if the use of this product causes the death of your firstborn, I'm not responsible (provided as-is; no warranty, liability, etc.) and if you redistribute this with or without modification, you need to credit me and copy the license along with the code. Otherwise, you can pretty much do what you want ;)