Large UK insurance company takes Swift training course to upgrade mobile apps

A large UK Insurance company recently requested the services of JBI to train employees in Swift, which is used for front end mobile app development. The insurance company requires the Swift training to improve the skillset of employees in order to upgrade their current mobile app from using the increasingly more archaic objective-C.

Swift is a relatively recent native app development language for Apple iOS, beginning to take over from objective-C and designed internally by Apple. The company is interested in developing their app to using swift because it is designed to be safer than C-based languages by eliminating entire classes of unsafe code. Furthermore, it is a far more intuitive language, with more concise syntax, allowing for cleaner code and thus fewer runtime crashes. In addition, Swift uses automatic reference counting (ARC), a rubbish collector function, which tracks all the work and memory usage, increasing app performance without lagging memory. Finally, Swift projects are much faster to develop and you reach a product that is future-proof because new features can be implemented when needed and Apple is far more likely to support Swift in the future than Objective-C, especially as it is currently one of the fastest developing languages.

In cooperation with JBI training and with the help of the instructor, a 4 day course was shortened to an intensive 3 day course for the insurance company. JBI also tailored the course to produce labs that reflect real life scenarios the developers may face. In order to determine the success of the course, several objectives were set for the delegates:

• To understand Swift and its role in iOS and OS X software development
• Produce working Mac, iPhone and iPad applications that use functions, different data types and standard libraries
• Be able to understand and utilise more advanced sections of Swift language in order to speed up iOS app development

The course took place virtually over zoom with about 10 delegates in attendance and relaying excellent feedback to JBI regarding the trainer and course content:

“The course touches upon the essential parts of Swift, as much is possible to cover in this time. But I am definitely in a better place than I was before the course. Thank you!” RB, Software Engineer

“Instructor is knowledgeable, passionate and I like his presentation style and approachability. He's always happy to answer questions about the labs when there's an issue with something not working” AWJ, Software Engineer

Here is a short video of a session on sets in Swift that would be taught during JBI Training's 4 day Swift training course.

For further information on the courses related to this, please see below:

Swift training course

Front end Mobile training course

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