Ask HN: Transition from Rails development to iPhone/Android?

#1

Post by southpolesteve » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 10:55 PM UTC

About a year ago I started learning web dev in my spare time. First HTML/CSS, the moved on to RoR and with it, Haml and Sass. I am in love with the simplicity and ease with which RoR and related tools lets me develop web apps. Recently, I picked up a book on Objective-C and iPhone dev. BAM! Brick wall. This kind of work seems to be much more painful.

So HN, I asks:

Is there any method, toolkit, library, etc that provides me the same ease and simplicity for iPhone/Android development work?

Re: Ask HN: Transition from Rails development to iPhone/Android?

#2

Post by DamonOehlman » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

If you are coming from a rails background then I would highly recommend having a look at Rhodes from Rhomobile (http://rhomobile.com/). There's lots of good things going for it and it also offers in-roads to developing on devices outside of just iPhone and Android.

If you don't find Rhodes a good fit, then have a look at PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com/) which offers similar functionality on a pure HTML + Javascript solution. I can't see you being disappointed with Rhodes though...

Re: Ask HN: Transition from Rails development to iPhone/Android?

#3

Post by vantran » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 11:24 PM UTC

You could also try out http://www.appcelerator.com/ It is similar to Phone Gap, and a lot of people use it to build simple iphone apps.

Re: Ask HN: Transition from Rails development to iPhone/Android?

#4

Post by gtracy » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 11:42 PM UTC

Have you looked into jquery mobile? Still in alpha, but a nice toolkit for building mobile apps that run in the browser but look and feel like a native app.

http://jquerymobile.com

Re: Ask HN: Transition from Rails development to iPhone/Android?

#5

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 3:47 AM UTC

[deleted]