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A lot of these success stories with RubyMotion seem to come from newcomers to iOS development like the creator of Jukely in this article. I can understand that

by ceeK 14y ago

A lot of these success stories with RubyMotion seem to come from newcomers to iOS development like the creator of Jukely in this article. I can understand that it must be a large benefit to adoption to be able to use Ruby rather than learn Obj-C and at the same time XCode. Despite this, what I would like to hear is the opinions of Obj-C iOS app developers who have used RubyMotion in their projects. I can't really see RubyMotion working in an app dev team at the moment. In my last iOS job for instance, I was working on legacy Obj-C code. Can this easily be ported over? Does it deal with retain/release well? Also, can anybody comment on app development times Obj-C vs RubyMotion (given that you know both)?.

gavingmiller 14y ago
I took a foray into RubyMotion. The experience was wonderful programming wise. I am much more comfortable/productive on the command line/vim than XCode. My plan was to port an existing application over to RubyMotion so that I could iterate faster on it. After a few days of work, the conclusion I came to was that it wasn't worth porting an existing application over. I didn't try to piece meal it (if someone demonstrates this, it will attract my attention), just a full re-write. For me the biggest hurdles were debugging. When something goes wrong it has to be relatively easy to debug. I was in on the early days of RubyMotion and found that their debug facilities were not sufficient enough for me (I think I'm more towards the end of the early adopters curve.) It's also my understanding that this has improved drastically since the early days. With all that said, the number of success stories that are coming out of RubyMotion has my attention (especially 37Signals). I will most certainly consider RubyMotion for any upcoming pet projets. I still won't use it in my business since you need someone versed in Ruby and partially in iOS, so until I have more developers with that skillset it's not worth going with something so esoteric since developers are so hard to come by as is.
bora 14y ago
Before Jukely, I was the product development manager for several iOS applications. Comparing my experience of building Jukely in RubyMotion to those other iOS apps my developers built using Objective-C, I can say that an application in RubyMotion can be built probably twice as fast. This may sound controversial, and is my personal opinion but that's what I believe. It took me around 2 1/2 months to build the iOS portion of Jukely and my estimation would be that it would take 4-5 months to build it in Objective-C.

by ceeK 14y ago

gavingmiller 14y ago

I took a foray into RubyMotion. The experience was wonderful programming wise. I am much more comfortable/productive on the command line/vim than XCode. My plan was to port an existing application over to RubyMotion so that I could iterate faster on it. After a few days of work, the conclusion I came to was that it wasn't worth porting an existing application over. I didn't try to piece meal it (if someone demonstrates this, it will attract my attention), just a full re-write. For me the biggest hurdles were debugging. When something goes wrong it has to be relatively easy to debug. I was in on the early days of RubyMotion and found that their debug facilities were not sufficient enough for me (I think I'm more towards the end of the early adopters curve.) It's also my understanding that this has improved drastically since the early days. With all that said, the number of success stories that are coming out of RubyMotion has my attention (especially 37Signals). I will most certainly consider RubyMotion for any upcoming pet projets. I still won't use it in my business since you need someone versed in Ruby and partially in iOS, so until I have more developers with that skillset it's not worth going with something so esoteric since developers are so hard to come by as is.

bora 14y ago

Before Jukely, I was the product development manager for several iOS applications. Comparing my experience of building Jukely in RubyMotion to those other iOS apps my developers built using Objective-C, I can say that an application in RubyMotion can be built probably twice as fast. This may sound controversial, and is my personal opinion but that's what I believe. It took me around 2 1/2 months to build the iOS portion of Jukely and my estimation would be that it would take 4-5 months to build it in Objective-C.