iOS Development: Architecture

Explore the fundamental concepts behind iOS application architecture and design best practices.

Behind every polished iOS app is a thoughtful plan. By understanding and applying the fundamental concepts behind iOS application architecture, you can ensure that the software you develop is well-understood, flexible, and easy to extend or refactor. In this course, instructor Károly Nyisztor dives into these concepts, helping to familiarize you with the basics of iOS application architecture and design best practices.

To begin, Károly explores the Unified Modeling Language (UML), goes over some core UML diagrams, and discusses the iOS app life cycle. Next, he covers fundamental architectural design patterns such as the model-view-controller (MVC)—the classical iOS app design paradigm—as well as the Model-View-ViewModel (MVMM) pattern and other alternatives to MVC. He also shares how to manage app state transitions and build responsive apps. In addition, he discusses URL scheme-based communication and AirDrop; efficient memory and power consumption; how to detect issues and bottlenecks in your apps; and more.

Introduction

• The value in architecting your apps
• What you should know

1. UML Basics

• A brief introduction to UML
• The use case diagram
• The class diagram
• The sequence diagram

2. The iOS App Life Cycle

• The app launch sequence
• Walking through the launch sequence
• App state preservation
• App state restoration
• The main run loop
• Subclassing UI application

3. Fundamental Architectural Design Patterns

• Introduction to fundamental architectural design patterns
• The model-view-controller
• The model-view-presenter
• MVP example
• Refactoring to MVP: Model
• Refactoring to MVP: Presenter
• Refactoring to MVP: View controller
• The Model-View-ViewModel pattern
• Implementing one-way binding, part 1
• Implementing one-way binding, part 2

4. App State Transitions

• The app delegate
• App state changes
• Demo: Define the states
• Demo: Instrument delegate calls

5. Building Responsive Apps

• The main UI thread
• Concurrency
• Moving work off the main thread
• Custom concurrent queues
• Deadlocks

6. The SOLID Principles

• Introduction to the SOLID principles
• Single responsibility
• The open/closed principle
• Liskov substitution
• Interface segregation
• Dependency inversion

7. Communication between Apps

• URL scheme-based communication
• Calling an app from another app
• URL scheme whitelist
• Passing parameters between apps
• Display the message, part 1
• Display the message, part 2
• AirDrop

8. Efficiency and Performance

• Respond to memory warnings via delegates
• Dispatch source memory pressure
• Optimizing for performance
• Analyze your app using Instruments

Conclusion

• Next steps