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Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

37signals.com

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Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#41

Post by lobster_johnson »

flixic wrote: post #3

Oh what a joy it is to read this! My experience with RubyMotion is very similar, and I am very happy to see major, high-profile app made with RubyMotion. However, I was somewhat disappointed to see that they use BubbleWrap persistence instead of true CoreData. I've been struggling to use CoreData without Xcode with RubyMotion for a while and haven't found a great solution yet.

Core Data lets you set up a schema progammatically. There no real need to design a .momd schema with the Xcode editor if you don't want to.

I heartily recommend Core Data. It just works the way you expect it to: it's transactional, it's got undo, it fits right into the bindings system, it supports custom serialization, extensive validation, persistent objects are real ObjC objects, and so on.

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#43

Post by kranner »

I'm a fairly experienced iOS developer and a Ruby beginner. I bought a license just to play with and learn about Ruby in a familiar context. But one thing I did not find mentioned is how slow the RubyMotion build-deploy cycle is.

For small changes, on a 2011 MBP, Xcode takes a few seconds to rebuild and deploy to the simulator. RubyMotion takes ages, easily exceeding one minute (single-core process?). Repeated a few times, it's enough to shift my thinking from play-mode to plan-mode. At this point I'm still too uncomfortable to begin new projects with RubyMotion, just because the slowness is so annoying.

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#44

Post by robterrell »

hayksaakian wrote: post #42

How does this compare to phone gap? I wouldn't know about rubymotion since I can't afford it.

Night and day different. Phone gap wraps html inside a web view in an app -- you write your app logic as you would any dynamic web page. Rubymotion buils a true native app. You write your app logic like you would in objective-c, using cocoa and foundation classes.

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#45

Post by hayksaakian »

robterrell wrote: post #44
hayksaakian wrote: post #42

How does this compare to phone gap? I wouldn't know about rubymotion since I can't afford it.

Night and day different. Phone gap wraps html inside a web view in an app -- you write your app logic as you would any dynamic web page. Rubymotion buils a true native app. You write your app logic like you would in objective-c, using cocoa and foundation classes.

Would you say it was worth it though? If I was going to go native, I might as well go full on obj.c otherwise I'd do phonegap.

I love ruby, but is that the only business case for rubymotion?

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#47

Post by tferris »

What I like about coding is that you learn every day and starting a new language is always inspiring and broadens you views. I just don't get those who like to approach everything with just one language.

Rubymotion won't hide the Objective-C API anyway, so people have still to learn and understand all of the Objective-C libs. There's no single reason to use Rubymotion. This paired with the all the typical fanboyism around Ruby, Rails, 37Signals is kind of annoying. Sorry to be harsh, but I don't care how a client for an aged app (Basecamp) is built with a cumbersome layer of abstraction.

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#48

Post by austinl »

I think there's a disproportionate amount of beginner's material that involves the use of storyboarding and Interface Builder, which gives the impression that iOS development is a lot like it is in Visual Basic.

Perhaps other iOS developers can weigh in on this, but I feel like it's fair to say that the most qualified developers do everything programmatically.

I've been doing everything exclusively programmatically since I've started, and I've never had any problems with XCode - to the point where I was surprised when I heard people complain about it for the first time.

From that point, the only downside I see to using Objective-C over Ruby is verbosity, but that seems pretty inconsequential given some of the benefits sandofsky mentioned above.

It's nice that there's something out there for experienced Ruby developers though.

Re: Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion

#49

Post by pjmlp »

austinl wrote: post #48

I think there's a disproportionate amount of beginner's material that involves the use of storyboarding and Interface Builder, which gives the impression that iOS development is a lot like it is in Visual Basic. Perhaps other iOS developers can weigh in on this, but I feel like it's fair to say that the most qualified developers do everything programmatically. I've been doing everything exclusively programmatically s…

It always baffles me the amount of developers that prefer to endure designing GUIs with code instead of GUI designers.

This doesn't scale when doing projects where the UI tends to be redesigned every few days.

In a few hours it is possible to design UIs that some require days to do it.

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