MTTForecast

This is a small application I did following Pedro's Frameworks «architecture» which basically is defined as follows:

Separate each layer into its own framework

The benefits are many, e.g.:

• Better separation of responsibilities
• Easier to test
• Less conflicts when multiple devs are working on the same project (but on different layers)

Overall this is perhaps not the best example but I think its a nice approach and I enjoyed doing it a lot.

Running

This project is ready to open and compile. Was written using Xcode 7.3.1.

To minimize potential issues the Pods directory is included in the project.

Due to the fact that the project uses CocoaPods you'll need to open ForecastApp.xcworkspace instead of the project file.

Installation from scratch

If the project failed to compile or you would like to setup the project by hand (instead of using the provided pre-configured repo) follow the instructions bellow:

Makefile

This project comes «equiped» with a Makefile that defines «macros» for most tasks to simplify the configuration and avoid potential issues.

To know what are the available tasks in the Makefile and know what they do simply run:

make help

Setting up the project

This project uses CocoaPods via a Gemfile. In order to properly «install» you need to first run:

gem install bundler

Once this is done you just need to run:

make bundle
make pod

This will install all the gems listed in the Gemfile into a bundle located at ./.vendor and then will execute pod install using the gem binary in the bundle.

This way every single developer that runs the project is doing it using the same tools as the rest of the team (same CocoaPods version, same synx, etc to avoid versioning issues).

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Important note: After running make pod you will be asked what's the APIKey, please enter the API key from the WorldWeather API.

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Approaches | Architecture

The application was coded using a «Framework Development» approach. This is basically separating some important layers into their own frameworks for better reusability.

With this approach the testing can be achieved better by separating concerns and responsabilities.

The main components of this app are as follow:

1. WorldWeatherCore: Core of the WorldWeather wrapper. Contains the definitions of all the models involved.
2. WorldWeatherMappings: This is the JSON parsing layer of the Core models. Separation is made because the data can come from many different sources and structures, thus bundling the parsing with the models would be a bad approach. This way the models are agnostic and this framework is solely in charge of mapping them from JSON into models.
3. WorldWeatherAPI: This layer is the one that directly interacts with the WorldWeather API, makes the requests and uses the 2 other frameworks to parse and return models as needed.

Design Patterns

Besides the Framework Development approach this application was build using MVVM.

This was a personal choice given that I'm an advocate of MVVM and its benefits and also because the «parsing of data» to be consumed by the Views is «heavy» for this project and MVVM helps us better format data for user's consumption at the ViewModel level.

Third party libraries

• ModelMapper: Lyft's framework ModelMapper helps simplify JSON mapping into models. Avoids adding as? casting everywhere by implying the resulting Type based on the receiver of the parsing.
• Moya: Moya is a great network abstraction layer. Is built on top of Alamofire and leverages the network layer by defining endpoints as enums. Comes with a built-in «offine/testing» mode that let's you use pre-saved JSON responses (makes testing easier).
• SDWebImage: Helps with the retrieval of remote images and loading them into UIImageView. Handles threading, caching and loading the remote images.
• SwiftGen: This is a CLI tool that helps add «strongly typed» features to the development process. Used in this project to generate strongly typed ViewController creation (can be used to generated localized strings, color literals and much more).

Missing pieces

Here's a small list of things missing or that could be improved upon:

• No UI testing. Would have loved to add Facebook Snapshot testing to the project.
• Better internal documentation: I added header documentation on most of the low level frameworks but ran out of time by the ViewModels and upper level classes. Would have loved to add more descriptive headers to the developer facing functions and properties.
• Better designed the UI: Right now the app is at a bare minimum not taking advantage of most of the data from the WorldWeather models. Also it looks pretty bad 🙈