ParseSwift or Objective-C SDK?

claesjacobsson · March 12, 2021, 4:57pm

I have an app written in mainly Obj-C using the Parse Objective-C SDK. Now I’m rewriting the app from scratch in SwiftUI for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and possibly macOS. Having just discovered ParseSwift, I wonder what would be the wisest choice for my app - ParseSwift or the Objective-C SDK?

My app uses CoreData and syncs to my Parse Server running @Sashido.

Any ideas or feedback would be much appreciated

cbaker6 · March 12, 2021, 11:24pm

If you 1) weren’t depending on the iOS Objective-C SDK to handle local storage for you and not using saveEventually or anything that ends in ...Eventualy or 2) Plan on handling local storage yourself (CoreData or something else) I strongly recommend using Parse-Swift as excluding what I mentioned above, it does everything the iOS SDK does and more. More query abilities, more features (i.e. support for certificate pinning), and is ~ parity with the JS SDK. In addition, Parse-Swift is designed for SwiftUI. Any method ending in Publisher uses Combine. In addition, LiveQuery subscriptions in Parse-Swift can be used as SwiftUI ViewModels out-of-the-box.

If you depend on Parse to handle local storage for you or want something that’s been battle tested, you should use the iOS SDK.

Edit: If you need to support older devices (which it doesn’t sound like you do because you mentioned SwiftUI), you should use the iOS SDK. Parse Swift is for .iOS(.v12), .macOS(.v10_13), .tvOS(.v12), .watchOS(.v5), Linux and there’s a current open PR to run on Android.

Edit: Parse-Swift should essentially be able run on Windows and CentOS as well.

There’s a decent differential in the amount of features Parse-Swift has over iOS SDK and my guess is that differential will continue growing over time.

claesjacobsson · March 13, 2021, 12:52am

Thanks for your reply!

Do you know if there is a minimum Parse Server version to use with ParseSwift?

Claes

cbaker6 · March 13, 2021, 1:27am

The majority of Parse-Swift should work with most of the older versions of server though there’s been many bug fixes overtime, 4.0.0+ should be fine. This is because Parse-Swift uses the REST API, so anything that worked in REST on older server versions technically should work with Parse-Swift, assuming that version the server encodes JSON correctly. If you do run into issues, then they are server issues that are probably fixed in newer versions (This will also be the case if you use the latest JS SDK client with an older version of Parse Server).

There’s one exception with query select and exclude that won’t work on <= 4.5.0 because of a JSON encoding issue:

github.com/parse-community/Parse-Swift

Fix query select and exclude

parse-community:main ← parse-community:testingSelect

opened 10:02PM - 02 Mar 21 UTC

cbaker6

+120 -31

Fix #86 select and exclude https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server/pull/…7242 - [x] Add variadic version of `exclude` - [x] `select` and `exclude` example in playground - [x] Ensure thread-safe `endpoint` is used for queries - [x] Modify fetch include to use an encoded array instead of join array - [x] Improve test cases `select`, `exclude`, and fetch include

Those don’t work due to a server-side design issue that was discovered recently. Hopefully, the fix will be merged on the server soon, but even after, you will need to run the latest from the main branch or wait for > 4.5.0 to be released`

github.com/parse-community/parse-server

Fix select exclude queries

parse-community:master ← cbaker6:fixSelectExclude

opened 04:22AM - 05 Mar 21 UTC

cbaker6

+581 -97

### New Pull Request Checklist - [x] I am not disclosing a [vulnerability](ht…tps://github.com/parse-community/parse-server/blob/master/SECURITY.md). - [x] I am creating this PR in reference to an [issue](https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server/issues?q=is%3Aissue). ### Issue Description Related issue: to an issue discovered and Fixes #7245 and on the Parse-Swift SDK, https://github.com/parse-community/Parse-Swift/pull/88 The keys and excludeKeys on the server are not digesting actual JSON arrays, ["yolo", ...], but instead digesting "yolo", .... Somehow JS treats both of these the same (I say this because the fixed PR I have for the server works with just removing 1 test case, more on this in the PR), but the server doesn't like it the way the Swift JSON encoder sends it, ["yolo", ...]. Note that this is the JSON encoder straight from Apples Swift source code and not the custom one used here for ParseObjects, so if it was encoding arrays incorrectly I'm sure it would have been caught awhile ago. ~~This PR has the possibility of being **breaking change** for some users due to:~~ > ~~This is the test case I **removed** because it 1) doesn't work anymore 2) not sure why we want this particular functionality for `select`. If you really want to exclude all keys, there should probably create an `excludeAll` or an `exclude(["*"]`~~ ### Approach Make `keys` and `excludeKeys` use the same strategy as a similar property like `include` which takes array of strings also, https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server/blob/b4920a693501ebe5afae0efe53a8cd3c62842177/src/Routers/ClassesRouter.js#L60-L68 ### TODOs before merging - [x] Add test cases - [x] Add entry to changelog - [x] Add changes to documentation (guides, repository pages, in-code descriptions) - PR created https://github.com/parse-community/docs/pull/820 - [x] Fix excluding nested fields (Fix #7030)

claesjacobsson · March 13, 2021, 12:58pm

Very useful answer! Thanks a lot