IBM has announced today that it is the first cloud provider to enable the development of applications in native Swift, server-side.
The phase is a key stage in IBM and Apple’s joint effort to assist enterprises in advancing their mobile strategy with innovative app design, analytics process transformation and integration required for a mobile first experience, the company notes.
Swift was introduced in 2014, but despite its short availability it has become the one of the fastest growing and most widely used programming languages — see this developer survey conducted by InMobi.
As IBM reveals, just two months since Apple open sourced Swift and IBM released its Swift sandbox for early exploration of server-side programming in Swift, the IBM Swift Sandbox has been used by more than 100,000 developers worldwide, executing more than 500,000 code runs.
IBM Swift engineers are working with the growing Swift.org developer community, and today they are announcing that developers can start exploring Swift on the IBM Cloud. This can be achieved in in three ways: by experimenting in the Swift Sandbox, by building end-to-end applications on Bluemix and quickly deploying them with Kitura, and by sharing Swift resources i.e. leverage code across projects by creating packages and submitting them to the Swift Package Catalog on Bluemix to encourage the sharing of new Swift resources with the global developer community.
