SwiftCGI

An object-functional microframework for developing FCGI applications in Swift

About

Well, the title pretty much says it all. This is a microframework (no, not 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 needed a quick socket library; a better version is in the works, most likely wrapping a more established C library).

Why?

A valid question. Mostly because I was bored one weekend. Also, because I am passionate about a couple of things. First, I love Swift. Apple 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 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. Finally, 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.

Vision

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. I envision an ORM, authentication plugins, etc. will be written over time, but my focus right now is the core framework. If the modularity part of the design works out properly, additional functionality will be relatively easy to hook in.

Current status

I would currently classify SwiftCGI as late alpha in that it is a funcitonal base that mostly modular design, is (mostly) unit tested, but is still somewhat incomplete. It is not ready for prime time yet, so expect things to change and occasionally break along the road to 1.0. NOTE: The current server has the same limitations of FCGIKit, which will be remedied in the future.

Credits

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 refactored much of it to be more "Swifty."

Quick Start

Clone the demo project from ianthetechie/SwiftCGI-Demo.
Open the SwiftCGI Demo project.
Run the project.
[RECOMMENDED] 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). Alternatively, you may use the embedded HTTP server scheme, which starts a (rather expreimental a this point) local HTTP server, which can be used to get started. I do NOT recommend this for serious use though. It is still highly experimental and rather flawed. SwiftCGI is designed, first and foremost, for FCGI app development.

location /cgi {
    fastcgi_pass    localhost:9000;
    fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
    include         fastcgi_params;
}

License This project is distributed under the terms of the 2-clause BSD license.

TL;DR - if the use of this product causes the death of your firstborn, I'm not responsible (it is 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 ;)

plumWorks/SwiftCGI