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I like PhoneGap, but I am not really sure why you would do this with RubyMotion when for most PhoneGap apps, you really don't need to go much outside of what th

I like PhoneGap, but I am not really sure why you would do this with RubyMotion when for most PhoneGap apps, you really don't need to go much outside of what there are already plugins for. In my experience, getting a plugin working in Obj-C is not terrible.

wprater 14y ago
A few reasons: There is no build system in PhoneGap, just instructions on how to get it build with Xcode. Using the RubyMotion build tools will allow you to work around this, all you'd really need is the Rakefile in this case, no extra Ruby files. It's agreed, that most may not need to write (or alter) Plugins for PhoneGap, but if you did, and if you'd prefer to write in Ruby, this article may be helpful! Or maybe you just want to tinker around.
- endemic 14y ago
  Hmm, I thought that v.2 shipped with some build scripts, so theoretically you wouldn't have to open Xcode, just do everything via command line.
apendleton 14y ago
> when for most PhoneGap apps, you really don't need to go much outside of what there are already plugins for The operative word here being "most." You're right that for apps that meet those constraints, this is not especially compelling; the target here is for apps that are exceptions. We have produced cross-platform apps that require additional capabilities beyond what Phonegap includes, and have ended up writing a cross-platform UI, plus some native ObjC and Java glue for iOS and Android, respectively, to provide that capacity. The combination presented here would mean that at least on iOS, you could have a slightly more-pleasant glue-writing experience, particularly since anecdotally, ObjC is the hardest of the pieces of that kind of project for non-experts to get started with.
- jcromartie 14y ago
  But RubyMotion still requires you to at least read Objective-C. Surely the little bit of glue code would look pretty much the same in Ruby as in ObjC, especially when it's mostly calling classes in the iOS and PhoneGap APIs anyway.

wprater 14y ago

A few reasons: There is no build system in PhoneGap, just instructions on how to get it build with Xcode. Using the RubyMotion build tools will allow you to work around this, all you'd really need is the Rakefile in this case, no extra Ruby files. It's agreed, that most may not need to write (or alter) Plugins for PhoneGap, but if you did, and if you'd prefer to write in Ruby, this article may be helpful! Or maybe you just want to tinker around.

endemic 14y ago
Hmm, I thought that v.2 shipped with some build scripts, so theoretically you wouldn't have to open Xcode, just do everything via command line.

apendleton 14y ago

> when for most PhoneGap apps, you really don't need to go much outside of what there are already plugins for The operative word here being "most." You're right that for apps that meet those constraints, this is not especially compelling; the target here is for apps that are exceptions. We have produced cross-platform apps that require additional capabilities beyond what Phonegap includes, and have ended up writing a cross-platform UI, plus some native ObjC and Java glue for iOS and Android, respectively, to provide that capacity. The combination presented here would mean that at least on iOS, you could have a slightly more-pleasant glue-writing experience, particularly since anecdotally, ObjC is the hardest of the pieces of that kind of project for non-experts to get started with.

jcromartie 14y ago
But RubyMotion still requires you to at least read Objective-C. Surely the little bit of glue code would look pretty much the same in Ruby as in ObjC, especially when it's mostly calling classes in the iOS and PhoneGap APIs anyway.