Check Out Kitura and other Updates to BluePic!

We are excited to announce that our team has just made several updates to the BluePic application. For those who are not familiar with BluePic, we built this application to demonstrate the capabilities available today for implementing an end-to-end solution [that can be deployed to the IBM Cloud] using the Swift programming language. BluePic is a photo sharing application for viewing, posting, and searching for images posted by other users of the application. BluePic takes advantage of Swift in a typical iOS client setting, but also on the server-side using the Kitura web framework. For an introduction to BluePic see Transition to Server-Side Swift with BluePic.

Though the first version of BluePic was released about a year ago, we still see a lot of interest in this application from the Swift developers community. We also recently held an IBM Code Tech Talk in October to discuss the benefits of using Swift for developing back-end components and also to discuss the architecture of the BluePic application. Here’s a list of the updates we just made to BluePic:

• Migrated Kitura-based server component to Swift 4.
• Migrated iOS client component to Swift 4.
• Updated Kitura-based server component to use latest version of CloudEnvironment. Updated routes in Kitura-based server component to use the Codable APIs now available in the latest version of Kitura.
• Updated iOS client to use the latest version of all pod dependencies.
• Updated README, deployment instructions, and other documentation accordingly.
• Added a new Dockerfile for running the Kitura-based server component locally in a Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) container.
• Updated Cloud Functions code to leverage Swift 3.1.1 and use the IBM Cloud CLI + Cloud Functions plug-in for deployment of the Cloud Functions component.

Also, as part of this update, our team validated the deployment steps (as documented in the README) to the IBM Cloud and verified that all functionality works as expected.

We encourage you to check out BluePic and take it for a test drive today! For more information on server-side Swift, visit the Swift@IBM Developer Center.


Ricardo Olivieri, Senior Software Engineer, IBM Swift Engineering at IBM Cloud