WriteFreely Swift Package

It’s been a while since I posted an update here, and I wanted to announce a new project: a WriteFreely Swift package that you can drop into your Mac and iOS apps.

You can find it here: https://github.com/writeas/writefreely-swift

What’s WriteFreely?

WriteFreely is an open-source platform for writing on the web. It powers the Write.as service (find me here!), and lets you build writing communities on the web.

I was introduced to Write.as and WriteFreely while working with Glitch, where I got to chat about the service and its principles with Matt and CJ. Matt wrote a thoughtful post on Glimmer about the importance of privacy for creating on the web, and CJ built a tonne of cool sample apps that connected to the Write.as service for their Glitch team.

Cool, Tell Me More About The Project

This project represents a couple of firsts for me:

• This is the first time I’ve worked on a Swift package
• This is the first time I’ve wrapped a RESTful API in Swift
• This is the first time I’ve worked with URLSession and Result in Swift

Right now, it’s an alpha/developer-preview release. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, and I’m looking forward to working towards a 1.0 with the WF community.

As I mention in this forum topic and my Write.as post, the design for the WriteFreelyClient is to leverage completion blocks that return a Result tuple with either a User, Post, or Collection (or an array of these types where that makes sense), or an Error on failure. That makes it pretty easy to build completion handlers:

func loginHandler(result: (Result<User, Error>)) {
    do {
        let user = try result.get()
        print("Hello, \(user.username)!")
    } catch {
        print(error)
    }
}

guard let url = URL(string: "https://your.writefreely.host/") else { fatalError() }
let client = WriteFreelyClient(for: url)
client.login(username: "username", password: "password", completion: loginHandler)

What’s Next For The Project?

Good question! There are definitely some major to-do items that are obvious to me:

• Add a test suite (there will be some refactoring required to facilitate this)
• Create generic-ish request templates to DRY out the WriteFreelyClient public methods
• Extend for use with the Write.as platform

Mostly, though, I’m excited for people to try it out and let me know how it works for them!