Yesterday IBM announced a Swift server side runtime environment, and from what I can gather, it looks to be geared towards enterprise use cases.

I’m not sure whether this is completely fair comparision, but IBM Bluemix gives me a feeling similar to that of which Windows Azure gave me when I first saw it, which in and of itself is not neccesairly a bad thing.

On a more important note though, yesterdays announcement brought to my attention just how serious of a commitment IBM is making to Swift. Not only is IBM building Swift into their buisness but over and above that they seem to investing serious engineering time into helping push Swift forwards.

You can see a broad overview of their various iniatives on the Swift homepage, but personally I found their Github page to paint a much clearer picture of their commitment. Suffice it to say, they are not playing around.

Kitura looks especially interesting and I’m going to try playing around with it this weekend to get a better of idea of its strenghts and weaknesses.

I see IBM’s commitment as something positive for Swift, but I do wonder what their endgame here is, are they going to try and sell us developer tools and/or infrastructure? Seems like it.

Either way I’m going to try to make more of an effort to watch and better understand IBM’s Swift development efforts, because as of right now, it looks somewhat promising.