Facebook SDK gives Apple’s Swift developers access to platform services

The SDK enables integration of iOS mobile apps with services on the social network.

Facebook is reaching out to developers who want to use Apple’s two-year-old Swift language, and enabling them to use it to integrate their iOS mobile apps with services on the popular social network.

The Facebook SDK for Swift, now in a beta release, extends Facebook platform capabilities to Swift developers. “Since Swift is still under active development, the Facebook SDK for Swift Beta supports Swift 2.2.1 and 2.3, which gives you the ability to submit apps to the Apple App Store today,” said Nikita Lutsenko, a Facebook software engineer. “Later this year we will update the Facebook SDK for Swift when Swift 3 reaches GM.”

Services provided by the SDK include Facebook Login, for authenticating users with Facebook credentials; Analytics for Apps, which provides tools for assessing an audience and reaching out to them via campaigns; Sharing, for sharing application content to Facebook; and Graph API, for reading and writing to Facebook’s social graph.

To use the SDK, which is accessible at this web page, developers are advised to load the latest version of the CocoaPods dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C, with version 1.0.1 or later supported. The SDK can be built without a dependency manager, but developers will have to manage several steps, including cloning the repository and adding the SDk as a Facebook sub-project.

Facebook is seeking feedback on and contributors to the beta release. Previously, Facebook provided a Swift implementation of Facebook and Parse’s Bolts collection of low-level libraries for developing mobile apps.

Source : http://www.infoworld.com/