January 6, 2008
IPhone to be first Mobile Ruby Platform
I’ve been preparing for the eventual release of the iPhone SDK by starting to teach myself Objective-C and getting to know the XCode tools. One of the new features of XCode 3.0 is official support of Cocoa-Ruby. Much like the concept behind Cocoa-Java (which is no longer supported), Cocoa-Ruby enables Ruby developers a way to quickly author OSX applications in a language with which they are already familiar. Given that the result is a compiled Universal Binary, it stands to reason that when the iPhone SDK is launched it too will benefit from this extension to the Cocoa Framework.
Coming from a background of creating Mojax, which is essentially a Javascript engine for mobile devices, I get the power of a scripting language as a way to quickly author a mobile application. Ruby is an extremely powerful scripting language (much more so than Javascript) … so the prospect of iPhone supporting Ruby as a first-class citizen is exciting indeed.
My only dilemma at this point is to decided if I should kill two birds with one stone and teach myself Ruby instead of Objective-C!