This is truly some exciting stuff. We have now recreated nearly everything we covered in our “Modern UIKit” series, but this time for the web. We have the ability to observe changes in a Swift model to update the UI in the browser, we can leverage bindings to drive navigation from our model, and we can leverage bindings to control HTML input elements and their focus. And it’s all thanks to a tiny set of fundamental tools that we built into our SwiftNavigation library that is completely cross platform.

A lot of people were surprised when they saw we were devoting any time at all to UIKit, and many thought we were wasting our time. But this is why. UIKit gave us a fresh sandbox to play around with observation and navigation concepts from scratch, without the baggage of SwiftUI, and that led us to build truly powerful tools.

And we could end the series right here, but we have one last thing we want to show off. We’ve done a good job of showing how to take a model that was originally built to power SwiftUI and UIKit apps and apply it to a web app too. But we haven’t built any new features in our model.

Let’s see what it takes to add a few new features to our model, and then update our various apps to take advantage of those new features.