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I think many of you have heard of RubyMotion. It's Ruby that runs on iOS, so you can finally use Ruby on your iPhone. Yay! Here to speak to us about that is Amit Kumar, he’s from Mumbai, India, but currently lives in New York.
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Are we good to go, Michael? When I started making a technical adjustment here, I will do a little soft-shoe. I guess I’m supposed to do the Gangnam style, but that's enough of that. I’m not in five-inch heels, though, so I got it easier than Britney. Okay, are we good to go? Oh great, so here I am.
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It has been great in San Francisco, coming all the way from Mumbai, India. Thank you, San Francisco and thank you, Josh. I'm here to talk about RubyMotion and Rubyizing iOS development. I have been doing RubyMotion for just a couple of months, and I would like to share my experiences and learnings about how I started getting into RubyMotion and what I have been doing so far. Before I do that, I’d like to quickly introduce myself. I have been doing Ruby development for almost four to five years and am a consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Limited.
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This company manufactures cars, and that’s what I have been hearing from everyone whenever I say I work for Tata: 'Oh, the company that manufactures cars!' But Tata is a company that is involved in every business you can think of. That is my GitHub handle, Twitter, and my blog post. Now, I would like to do a quick survey: how many of you in the crowd are Objective-C programmers and have done it in Xcode? Keep your hands up if you love Objective-C!
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Based on that, I can be safe in saying I'm not going to be killed here because about a year before I started learning Objective-C, I thought about learning it. This is what I ended up with: it was complicated! Everyone is talking about simplifying things, but I found it complicated. So I chose not to go that route. Just this May, something changed: Laurent Sansonetti, a one-man army, created RubyMotion. When it launched, I saw that and liked it so much that I went ahead and paid for it. It's a paid licensed product, and I have enjoyed it.
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I have built three apps so far, one of which will be in the App Store pretty soon. Recently, Laurent was joined by Watson, who is a well-known developer from Japan. So what is RubyMotion and how does Laurent define it? Basically, Laurent says that it is a revolution for building native iOS applications using the Ruby language. I define it as a developer’s envy and a coder’s delight, which brings happiness.
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In this presentation, we will see moments of happiness as a Ruby developer. Let's dive deep into what RubyMotion exactly is. RubyMotion is a fork of MacRuby, a Ruby implementation of Mac OS X that compiles into optimized machine code. In essence, the source code of Ruby is compiled into an optimized version of machine code which, in turn, gets converted into assembly language by LLVM. Laurent rewrote LLVM for RubyMotion because it was forked from MacRuby.
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It has automatic memory allocation and reclamation, which is pretty cool. This is the first moment of happiness for me because I do not have to deal with memory management of objects; RubyMotion takes care of it. The other aspect is that it compiles the interface. If you have done a bit of Objective-C programming and have heard about storyboards and NIBs, you know you create interfaces in Xcode's Interface Builder.
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With RubyMotion, you can create your interfaces in Xcode and import that XML file into your RubyMotion application. RubyMotion takes care of compiling it, which is neat. This is the second moment of happiness because it allows you to design the interface in Xcode and still import it into your RubyMotion application.
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RubyMotion's runtime is tightly integrated with Objective-C's runtime, which means it has the same ancestors. All classes that you have in Objective-C can be used directly in your Ruby applications built with RubyMotion. For example, if you look at an NSArray, its ancestors are RubyMotion classes as well as the Objective-C classes like NSMutableArray.
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So what this means is, you can potentially use shared objects between your Ruby code and your Objective-C code without any performance impact. When building a RubyMotion application, you are essentially building an Objective-C application because, at the end of it, it compiles into executables similar to those from an Objective-C application. There are differences, though, as RubyMotion is relatively new.
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Let’s look at its architecture. As I said, RubyMotion and Objective-C share the same runtime with the same ancestors, which is the Foundation framework. You can potentially call all the SDK APIs from your Ruby application. When I started learning RubyMotion, there were a few questions I asked myself and that I have been asked by others. I call them myths.
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The first question I was asked multiple times is: 'Can I code in RubyMotion without the pain of learning the Cocoa framework?' I would like each of you to answer that question. Do you think it’s possible? Exactly! My answer is no. Rather, I feel that if you are coding in RubyMotion, you are more closely tied to the Cocoa framework.
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As Ruby developers, we want to control things. By control, I mean not controlling everyone, but controlling the code we write. We do not believe in magic; we want to build our interfaces ourselves through code. So let’s look at another powerful aspect of RubyMotion.
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The second question I was asked is: 'What about frameworks like PhoneGap?' Are any of you fans of PhoneGap-like frameworks? Yes, there are these tools which do similar things, so why should I care about learning RubyMotion? My answer would be: let's look at the pros and cons of PhoneGap.
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The first benefit is ease of use; you code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which many of us love. JavaScript is seen as the next big thing. However, there are a few drawbacks. PhoneGap operates through a bridge, and whenever there is a bridge involved, you run into performance bottlenecks. Apple does not optimize UIWebView.
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Additionally, it follows a single-thread model, resulting in about a quarter of the performance that you would get in a native application. You are also limited by the support of PhoneGap and debugging becomes extremely painful because it uses the native JS bridge Apple provides to make native API calls.
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So, how do I download RubyMotion? As I mentioned, it's a licensed product, and you need to pay two hundred dollars. Stay tuned, as there’s a surprise at the end of the session, so keep your eyes open. After downloading it, you install one command that kicks things off, called the motion command, where you have four options.
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The first is 'motion create,' which helps you create a vanilla application. The second is 'motion activate,' which activates the license. It's pretty straightforward. Then there’s 'motion update’ for software updates, and 'motion support,' which is cool because it gives you access to RubyMotion’s support ticket system from your console.
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After creating your first application, your project structure will look something like this: you will have a rake file, along with the app delegate class, which serves as the point of delegation entry into the application. You also have resources and a spec directory, which we will talk about shortly. Now, let's address the motion rake command specifically.
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Most Ruby developers know what rake is, and it's your bread and butter in RubyMotion for developing, testing, and deploying applications. The starting point is 'rake' command, which builds your application and runs it in the simulator. The second command is 'spec,' which runs tests against your application.
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RubyMotion comes with a built-in testing framework that resembles RSpec, called Matt Bacon, which has all the flavor of RSpec syntax that you may be used to. The 'build' command archives your application and creates an IPA file, which you can distribute or push to the App Store. There are other commands as well, but as a new developer in RubyMotion, those functionalities should suffice for now.
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One important command is the 'reconfig' command, as every iOS application has numerous configuration options. This command lists down all the configuration options available for your application. It contains valuable information such as the name of your application, the app delegate class, framework options, and device family specifications.
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Moreover, RubyMotion compiles your Ruby source code alphabetically by default, which can lead to compilation issues when there is a class inheritance that does not follow that order. When you encounter such situations, it’s essential to instruct the compiler to redefine the compilation order.
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Additionally, you have access to vendor projects that help you use external libraries in your RubyMotion applications. This is a powerful addition that enables seamless integration of external libraries, which can also be Objective-C libraries. Let’s take a look at the soul of RubyMotion.
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The soul of RubyMotion, which I love so much, is the REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop), which facilitated my understanding of the Cocoa UI model. I’m going to take a risk and do a quick demo to illustrate how it works.
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For this demo, I created a default application. As you can see, I have integrated a bundler dependency management tool into it. For the purposes of this demonstration, I will simply launch the application.
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This is where your control will begin. Let’s grab the instance variable of the controller from the console by utilizing some syntactic sugar from Bubble Wrap, which is a RubyMotion gem. Okay, so I’m going to run that now.
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I got the instance handle of the controller. Let’s change the background color of the view. Which color do you prefer? Blue? Green?
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Now I will add a control on the fly, specifically a segmented control. Once I correctly create this control and add it to the view, I should see it in action.
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This is the Ruby syntax I’ve written so far, and I love it. Fingers crossed that this works! And I was successfully able to add a control from the command line, which is awesome.
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Next, let's move it down by 200 pixels and 100 pixels to the right. I’m going to use an additional RubyMotion gem called SugarCube to accomplish that.
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Here’s the view I want to adjust: I have the handle to that specific view now. Let’s move it down and towards the right.
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While doing this, I noticed something interesting. If I hold the Command key, I can easily drag and move UI elements within the simulator. You see, it changes to an interactive view as I hover, which is quite intuitive!
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I can change the label of the segmented control by navigating through the hierarchy of classes. This is an excellent feature of the RubyMotion framework.
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I have successfully completed the demo and feel in control. This is yet another moment of happiness!
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I encourage you to check out an in-browser demo of Ripple. You can visit a specific link to see three applications and learn about the build process, which consists of four main steps: compiling, linking, packaging, and an optional code signing step.
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With RubyMotion, when you fire the rake command, all your Ruby code is compiled into machine code, which is converted into assembly language with LLVM. The machine code is linked with RubyMotion statically and then packaged or copied into your application’s build directory.
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You’ll end up with a fully compiled code ready to be pushed to the App Store. You may even create an IPA file ready for distribution. When it comes to testing, RubyMotion comes pre-packaged with an RSpec-like framework called Matt Bacon.
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This provides the basic structure for testing your application, including assertions, matchers, and before/after blocks. You’ll find a default test that passes simply to serve as a starting point for your application. Testing is crucial in ensuring that your application is functional and stable.
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As we navigate through testing, let's return to the spec directory. Every application has a 'main_spec.rb' file, containing a simple assertion that checks if your UIWindow is created.
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Let's run this test, and it should launch the simulator again as the test is executed in that environment.
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Cool, it passed, showing one window and one specification, with zero failures!
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Matt Bacon includes syntactic sugar similar to what you would find in the RSpec framework, along with facilities to test your views that are built using Interface Builder.
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In order to test shared applications internally for a client, we set up a continuous integration system using Jenkins. Whenever code is checked in, it triggers a process that publishes the application internally using Apple’s over-the-air deployment technology.
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In fact, RubyMotion provides a seamless way to manage external libraries through four methods: Ruby gems, Objective-C projects, native C code, and CocoaPods. This allows developers to integrate various libraries into their RubyMotion applications.
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RubyMotion gems differ from normal Ruby gems due to its static compilation. You can use Bundler to manage dependencies effectively by creating a Gemfile and including it in your Rakefile.
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The RubyMotion community has developed several popular gems: Bubble Wrap, which reduces verbosity in Objective-C code, SugarCube for visual layouts, and Teacup for stylesheet-like development.
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All these libraries enhance the RubyMotion experience, making development enjoyable and efficient. In summary, RubyMotion has come a long way, but certain features such as debugging are still limited.
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However, despite its youth, RubyMotion applications have already seen success in the App Store. Apps like Kappa Phi and others are leading the charge, with more on the way!
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Thank you for your attention. As a token of appreciation, I can offer you a 15 percent discount if you’re interested in trying RubyMotion. Just shoot me an email, and you'll get this discount.
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Thank you very much!
