RubyMotion Rubyizing iOS development

From Gogaruco 2012

Presenter: Amit Kumar

Intro

Objective-C is complicated!
RubyMotion is enjoyable!

What is RubyMotion

Ruby tool chain for building iOS apps
Neighbors envy and developer happiness

Fork of MacRuby
Compiles into optimized machine code
Automatic object memory allocation and reclaim
Compiles the interfaces built in Interface Builder of XCode
Ruby-runtime tightly integrated
Share ancestors as Objective-C
Object can be shared with no performance cost

Motion Runtime

Shared runtime with Objective-C
Foundation framework
Interact directly with SDK

Myths

Can I code using RubyMotion without the pain to learn Cocoa Framework?

PhoneGap like tools are much easier to learn what advantage do I get with RubyMotion?

PhoneGap

Pros

• Very easy to get started because its fimiliar

Cons

• Its a bridge and therefore a performance bottleneck
• Single thread model
• 1/4 of the performance you get in a native application
• Limited support of APIs
• Debugging becomes extremely difficult

Download and install

$ motion
$ motion create gogaruco
$ rake
$ rake config

AppDelegate is entry point to application
Frameworks are those available from Cocoa
You can use app.file_dependencies to tell build process which files to compile first

The Soul of RubyMotion

Console REPL - Read Eval Print Loop
You feel in control and moment of happiness

Build Process

Compiling

• Build assembly language/machine code Linking
  Packaging
• Copies executable files Code Sign
• Only required when you push to app store

Testing your Code

RubyMotion comes bundled with MacBacon which is like RSpec
MacBacon has almost all of RSpec API

• Assertions
• Matchers
• before/after blocks
• View testing

Continuous Integration

Dev > GitHub web hook > Jenkins CI > Locally installed App Store > Install/update devices

Using External Tools

RubyGems

• Don't work because RubyMotion gems have to be statically compiled
• Have to use RubyMotion gems
• Many RubyMotion gems
  • Bubblewrap
  • teacup
    • View stylesheet
  • sugarcube
  • formotion Bundler
    Objective-C
• app.vendor_project Native C code
• Use BridgeSupport to get Complex C data structures to RubyMotion CocoaPods
• dependency manager for Objective-C
• declare dependencies in Rakefile

RubyMotion is brand new

No debugger because of REPL
Some dynamic code doesn't work

[email protected] for 15% discount of RubyMotion

External Links

• Slides