Classes

Classes really are the bread and butter of object oriented programming (OOP). They are the building blocks of any applications which allow you to create "objects" to work with.

Essentially, a class couples together variables/contants and functions into one manageable package for you to work with.

Classes are abstract blueprints for the objects that your application needs to work with.

As a starting point:

• Each class should be its own Swift file.
• Classe should start with an upper case letter and are camel cased.
• Classes start with the keyword class, the class name and then a set of curly brackets.
• Everything goes inside these brackets.

class Person {

}

The above is a class decleration for a Person object. It doesn't do a lot at the moment, but already we can start creating Person objects in our application:

let someone = Person()

Lets expand the class to make it a bit more useful. Generally you can think of objects as being made up of two main components.

• Its properties
• Its methods (functions)

Properties

Lets start with adding some properties. Properties are simply constants and vairables within a class, think of them as the information associated with the object. For example sticking with our Person class, typically a person may have an age and an name:

class Person {

  let name: String!
  var age: Int!

}

Here we're saying that a Person has a name which is a String and an age which is an Int. We've declared a name as a constant and age as a variable, in our example a persons age can change, but once a name is set, they are not allowed to change it. At the moment, we will actully have a compile error, that's because name hasn't be given a default value. We could fix this by setting it as nil, but lets look at adding an initilizer to solve this problem:

init(name: String, age: Int) {
  self.name = name
  self.age = age
}

The init is a decleration looks a lot like a normal function, just without the keyword func. All classes get a default initilizer which we dont have to write, but would like like init(). The one we've writen above works exactly like a normal funtion, we are saying that we want to pass a name which is of type String and an age which is of type Int. We then assign those value we passed into the init to the respective propertive of the Person object.

Self?

You may be wondering what this self word is all about. Well, the constants that we pass into our init are called "name" and "age" which are the same names we gave our poperties. Within the init function "name" and "age" would reference the values passed into it opposed to the properties. Prefixing them with self make it clear were referencing the class properties.

Creating a Person

Now we have a very basic class setup we can start using person objects, technically called "instances". Creating one would look like this:

let someone = Person(name: "John", age: 20)

Creating an instance of our Person class looks a lot like creating any other vairiable or constant, we define it with let or var, give it a name and then use the initilized that we declared in the class, in the above example we now have a constant called someone, which is a Person object. You accessing properties of the object by using dot syntax. Here we'll simple print the persons name and because the age property was declared with var, we can change it to something else:

print(someone.name)
//Prints "John"

someone.age = 21
//Someones age will now be set to 21