On 06/07/2012, at 10:34 AM, Ben Taylor wrote:

> I'm currently using RubyMotion to build a little Umbrella Advisor app. I've 
> also done a bunch of random fiddling around with it and have quite enjoyed 
> it. Previously I've used PhoneGap and found it super frustrating. As soon as 
> I needed to anything they hadn't specifically implemented for me I had to 
> drop back to Objective C and implement it, as well as a bridge to JS. It got 
> much too complex much too quick.

I had a similar experience using PhoneGap at the start of the year. The tools 
are getting better (Remote Web Inspector in Safari 6), but do you really want 
to bring the baggage of the web on to your mobile? I like laying out a view and 
knowing it's going to look exactly like that. I spent a tonne of time dealing 
with things that stopped me from writing real code.

> The difference here is that your Ruby code is being compiled and run within 
> the Objective C environment. All of the standard Ruby library also sits on 
> stop of Cocoa. Plus you can do neat things like Reopen a Objective C class 
> and monkey patch your own methods in there. Here's a little tweet of mine 
> that did the rounds a while ago 
> https://twitter.com/taybenlor/status/217082997516673024
> 
> The biggest downside is that you can't use the Xcode UI and Core Data tools. 
> However on the other hand, you don't have to use Xcode. So I see it as a 
> bonus :P

You can definitely use storyboarding with RubyMotion. It's more awkward because 
you cannot plug actions and outlets, but with minimal glue I think it's an 
acceptable trade off. I gave a talk last month at the Brisbane Ruby and Rails 
Brigade demonstrating this technique. The code and screenshots are available at 
https://github.com/tatey/posts.

On the other hand, I think we're going to continue to see an explosion of DSLs 
for taking the pain out of rolling your own views anyway. I'm interested in 
watching this space.

Cheers,
Tate

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