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I love writing Ruby code, but today I'm finally at a point where I also feel happy and productive with Objective-C. What made my eyes bulge is this: http://www

by stephth 14y ago

I love writing Ruby code, but today I'm finally at a point where I also feel happy and productive with Objective-C. What made my eyes bulge is this: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/guides/project-management/#_configuration http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/guides/project-ma... No XCode. Instead of obscure and impenetrable project files, a convention over configuration Rakefile. Clean and Ruby-like workflows and repositories. While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to program in RubyMotion, we do not provide any support for Xcode out-of-the-box. We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for Ruby development (or development in general). Ruby also makes it very easy to write great Domain-Specific Languages that can be used as elegant alternatives to graphical user interface or data modeling tools. [1] Laurent Sansonetti gets it. I've been writing iOS code for three years and have never been able to figure out how to have a frictionless workflow around XCode, everything about it is convoluted. The idea of automating frequent development tasks with Ruby generators and DSLs sounds exciting and promising. [1] http://www.rubymotion.com/support/#faq http://www.rubymotion.com/support/#faq

petercooper 14y ago
Which makes me wonder.. is it possible to rig up such an environment for standard Objective C iOS app development? It could be huge.
- Zev 14y ago
  Do Makefiles count? Xcode project are largely (not so) shiny wrappers around Makefiles and keeping track of files.
- GreySyntax 14y ago
  For writing iOS apps I tend to use the THEOS makefile framework by DHowett gives you fine grained control over everything :)
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  It's entirely possible to use Make (or whatever you want) to build a project. There's no magic to Xcode. You just need to invoke to correct compiler and linker (Apple's GCC, usually), include the right flags and frameworks for them, and probably invoke some Apple tools for things like code-signing.
equalarrow 14y ago
At first glance, I was skeptical of this. I was immediately thinking "jesus, wtf? yet another way people want to avoid Obj-C?". But last night I decided to take the plunge, bought a license and played around with it. I dabbled in Obj-C over the years and jumped on the iOS dev bandwagon as soon as the first SDK was available. It was a long journey and coming from Ruby, I was very resistant. Once you're used to succinct syntax, it's really hard to use something as wordy as Obj-C (this was the main reason I never went back to Java). But over the years I came to appreciate Obj-C. I loved the speed and I clearly knew mobile was gonna be the next real fun thing to work on. And that's where I've been the past 4 years, iOS land. I'm pretty comfortable now with Obj-C and the iOS framework and have worked on a number of projects in the app store. I can really say that I've seen all levels of crappy to great code. But last night when I went thru the samples of the Ruby Motion stuff, I was a little flabbergasted. I'm (now) so used to XCode code completing long method names and when I saw the Ruby equivalent and how condensed everything was, it kinda blew my mind again. I found myself thinking "whoa, that's right, there's no interfaces" when looking at the accessors (omg, so much less code vs. using typical ivar properties) and just all these little Rubyisms that I'm not used to seeing with iOS. It totally made me smile. Oh yah and blocks! They're, like, readable again. :) Anyway, just to play around with the examples (which are pretty decent) was worth the intro price for me (I can expense it anyway). One big thing that does not yet exist is IB support. A few years back I switched to IB 100% (when possible) and so I'd much rather lay out my ui vs. code it all up. I've included a good Ars link below and in it Sansonetti says they're coming out with a DSL for easily laying out the ui. That will be interesting and it could push me over the edge for using this on a real project. Time will tell. I kinda feel like I felt the first time I saw Rails. I would recommend anyone remotely interested just check out the Github demos. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-building-ruby-ios-applications-with-rubymotion.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-build...

by stephth 14y ago

petercooper 14y ago

Which makes me wonder.. is it possible to rig up such an environment for standard Objective C iOS app development? It could be huge.

Zev 14y ago
Do Makefiles count? Xcode project are largely (not so) shiny wrappers around Makefiles and keeping track of files.
GreySyntax 14y ago
For writing iOS apps I tend to use the THEOS makefile framework by DHowett gives you fine grained control over everything :)
lobster_johnson 14y ago
It's entirely possible to use Make (or whatever you want) to build a project. There's no magic to Xcode. You just need to invoke to correct compiler and linker (Apple's GCC, usually), include the right flags and frameworks for them, and probably invoke some Apple tools for things like code-signing.

equalarrow 14y ago

At first glance, I was skeptical of this. I was immediately thinking "jesus, wtf? yet another way people want to avoid Obj-C?". But last night I decided to take the plunge, bought a license and played around with it. I dabbled in Obj-C over the years and jumped on the iOS dev bandwagon as soon as the first SDK was available. It was a long journey and coming from Ruby, I was very resistant. Once you're used to succinct syntax, it's really hard to use something as wordy as Obj-C (this was the main reason I never went back to Java). But over the years I came to appreciate Obj-C. I loved the speed and I clearly knew mobile was gonna be the next real fun thing to work on. And that's where I've been the past 4 years, iOS land. I'm pretty comfortable now with Obj-C and the iOS framework and have worked on a number of projects in the app store. I can really say that I've seen all levels of crappy to great code. But last night when I went thru the samples of the Ruby Motion stuff, I was a little flabbergasted. I'm (now) so used to XCode code completing long method names and when I saw the Ruby equivalent and how condensed everything was, it kinda blew my mind again. I found myself thinking "whoa, that's right, there's no interfaces" when looking at the accessors (omg, so much less code vs. using typical ivar properties) and just all these little Rubyisms that I'm not used to seeing with iOS. It totally made me smile. Oh yah and blocks! They're, like, readable again. :) Anyway, just to play around with the examples (which are pretty decent) was worth the intro price for me (I can expense it anyway). One big thing that does not yet exist is IB support. A few years back I switched to IB 100% (when possible) and so I'd much rather lay out my ui vs. code it all up. I've included a good Ars link below and in it Sansonetti says they're coming out with a DSL for easily laying out the ui. That will be interesting and it could push me over the edge for using this on a real project. Time will tell. I kinda feel like I felt the first time I saw Rails. I would recommend anyone remotely interested just check out the Github demos. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-building-ruby-ios-applications-with-rubymotion.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-build...