Member-only story
Who Killed IBM Kitura?
And what does the future hold for server-side Swift?
The year was 2016 and I was attending a session by Greg Heo at the IndieDevStock conference in beautiful Nashville TN. Greg was talking about server-side Swift using the IBM Kitura framework. As a previous .NET developer, and having worked on server-side technologies for over a decade, I was overjoyed to see Swift running on the server.
Fast forward to 2019 and IBM just announced that it will no longer be working on the Kitura framework.
Although Kitura is open source and developers can continue working on it even after IBM pull the plug, the reality is that when you cut the roots, the tree eventually dies.
Kitura was loosely based on the popular Node framework, Express. The ease of use and simplicity of the architecture made Kitura a great choice among other server-side Swift frameworks. The Kitura team even took one step further in developing a desktop Mac client to quickly configure and create Kitura based applications.
Having developed Udemy courses for both Kitura and Vapor, I always ranked Kitura above Vapor in terms of clean, easy-to-use…
