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30Apr

The iPhone SDK, Objective C and Ruby

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I bet many of you have already seen the iPhone SDK presentation.
I believe that many will be tempted by the platform. There are barriers for
entry though. You have to do all development on a Mac, you have to have an
iPhone (emulators are not for production testing), you have to be a partner in
the Apple developer program and you have to write code in Objective-C.

Objective what? Objective-C is a language that sits on top of C. It has
some dynamic features and the syntax will instantly remind you of SmallTalk.
Actually, I shrug at the idea of writing code that looks like SmallTalk with
C like constructs. Sounds like sweet and sour Chinese food to me (it reminds
me of the ugly "new" operator that is off place in JavaScript). But
Apple has done a great job with Cocoa
(the MacOS X interface toolkit) and CocoaTouch (the one designed for touch
interfaces, iPhone, iPodTouch and soon iTablet). The API is very elegant and
clean (I still yearn for the BeOS API though, and will do so always).

OK, what does this have to do with Ruby? Well, a very interesting project
popped up in the Ruby core list recently. Apparently, Apple is integrating the
whole of Ruby1.9 into the Objective-C runtime and it is calling the package MacRuby. Ruby
code will have access to all Cocoa interfaces
and vice-versa. This project is an open source one but is being spearheaded by
Apple. All those actively contributing right now are Apple engineers. They are
trying to expand the interfaces to their APIs and thus cater for more
developers.

Will we ever see an iPhone shipping with MacRuby? Will we be able to write
Cocoa Touch interfaces in Ruby? Imagine that, I will no longer be ashamed that I don’t know shoes!

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