RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely • Hacker News Board

Re: RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely

#11

Post by damoncali » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 8:35 PM UTC

I've not used RubyMotion despite coming from a Ruby background because it looks like you wind up writing a lot of Ruby that ends up looking an awful lot like, well, Objective C. It doesn't feel very much like Ruby. If the code is just (or nearly) as verbose and obscure, why bother giving up Xcode, storyboards, etc and adding a dependency on RubyMotion?

I feel like the hurdles of learning Cocoa are far greater than those of Objective C, and potentially even tricker because you've got to translate it into Ruby.

But I acknowledge this concern is not born of experience. Anyone care to comment?

Re: RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely

#12

Post by bora » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:51 PM UTC

ceeK wrote: post #3

A lot of these success stories with RubyMotion seem to come from newcomers to iOS development like the creator of Jukely in this article. I can understand that it must be a large benefit to adoption to be able to use Ruby rather than learn Obj-C and at the same time XCode. Despite this, what I would like to hear is the opinions of Obj-C iOS app developers who have used RubyMotion in their projects. I can't really see…

Before Jukely, I was the product development manager for several iOS applications. Comparing my experience of building Jukely in RubyMotion to those other iOS apps my developers built using Objective-C, I can say that an application in RubyMotion can be built probably twice as fast. This may sound controversial, and is my personal opinion but that's what I believe. It took me around 2 1/2 months to build the iOS portion of Jukely and my estimation would be that it would take 4-5 months to build it in Objective-C.

Re: RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely

#13

Post by bora » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:55 PM UTC

nirvanatikku wrote: post #8

danneu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is lamenting about the Objective-C language verbosity/ceremony compared to Ruby, not the Cocoa Touch framework. After all, you're still using the same iOS framework with RubyMotion. But you do get to use Ruby, and more interestingly you get to use rake and Cocoa wrappers like BubbleWrap[1]. [1]: https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap

Fair point. I focused a bit too much on the framework itself, but I was really trying to address the 'intimidating' nature of objective-c (as it relates to getting things done in iOS). Certainly I can appreciate the verbosity in comparison and I know where RubyMotion has it's place. Just saying for the folks that are intimidated by objective-c (and have yet to give it a shot): try not to be!

My intimidation doesn't come from the difficulty of Objective-C but 1) The time it takes to build iOS apps using Objective-C and 2) verboseness. I explained above that I think it would take twice as long to build the same app in Objective-C and that thought intimidates me as for most of us the apps we're building are experiments. We don't know if it will catch on or not. And I would like to see results as quickly as possible, especially in a bootstrapped project like this.