With this open-source framework you can create the user interface (UI) for Apple iPhone & iPad devices using a markup language similar to HTML rather than by writing programming code. It’s a lot easier for most people who are not professional iOS developers to take this approach than to deeply delve into a full-fledged development environment.
The project is hosted on Github & full source code is freely available on the Site. It’s maintained by Brown, who is also the developer behind HTTP-RPC, a popular open source mechanism for executing remote procedure calls via HTTP by allowing callers to invoke arbitrary operations on remote endpoints via URLs & JSON, instead of having to use XML messages & descriptors.
MarkupKit, requires Xcode 7, Apple’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) & the Swift programming language. To get started you need to create a project in Swift & add the MarkupKit framework as an embedded linked library. You then import the MarkupKit module into your project & you can then take a look at the code in the getting started page of the Github project to get an idea of the steps necessary to get to the point of adding a view controller & putting together a “hello world” app.
At this point, you basically set up an XML file where you mark up your user interface, with or without storyboards. XML elements represent instances of UIView subclasses, while XML attributes represent properties associated with those views. Values of attributes that begin with @ denote a localized version & a number of reserved attributes are available that perform functions similar CSS styles or for constructing new instances.
MarkupKit also allows for the creation of templates by abstracting common sets of property definitions, so that there’s no need to repeatedly apply the same set of property values while constructing a user interface. Other interesting features of the framework are: Outlets – assignation of an ID to a view instance which makes it accessible to calling code; Actions – UIKit controls notify an app when it needs to respond to user interaction.
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