RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely | Hacker News Reader

RubyMotion Success Story: Jukely

blog.rubymotion.com

61 pointsjballanc12 comments

Godspeed you pioneers who are venturing forth and coming back to report on your successes and failures. Many of us ObjC/XCode types that love Ruby are carefully watching... But feel its still too early to take those chances.

I wish that I had watched PhoneGap more carefully. Had I paid attention, I definitely wouldn't have chosen that route. I make that comparison because the gotchas aren't apparent until you've fully invested. I think that same might be true for RubyMotion. I'm happy to be wrong!

Would love your comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5344037

True words.

- From another Cocoa devs, who loves Ruby.

I just wrote a small iOS using RubyMotion myself and submitted it to the appstore. It will look horrible because I am so bad at design and just stick with the iOS defaults BUT it will work! It took me only a couple of days to write and RubyMotion gems like "BubbleWrap" and "Formotion" helped me a lot.

RubyMotion is awesome because it's just a bridge to the iOS frameworks. You'll have to learn the Apple provided frameworks but on the other hand using Ruby and your favourite editor of choice is much easier than doing development with 3 unknowns (Objc, XCode, UIKit) at the beginning.

After some hours you can "migrate" objc code to RubyMotion in seconds, using most Cocoapods is no problem.

BubbleWrap: https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap

Formotion: https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion

Sugarcube: https://github.com/rubymotion/sugarcube

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?

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 RubyMotion working in an app dev team at the moment. In my last iOS job for instance, I was working on legacy Obj-C code. Can this easily be ported over? Does it deal with retain/release well?

Also, can anybody comment on app development times Obj-C vs RubyMotion (given that you know both)?.

I took a foray into RubyMotion. The experience was wonderful programming wise. I am much more comfortable/productive on the command line/vim than XCode.

My plan was to port an existing application over to RubyMotion so that I could iterate faster on it. After a few days of work, the conclusion I came to was that it wasn't worth porting an existing application over. I didn't try to piece meal it (if someone demonstrates this, it will attract my attention), just a full re-write.

For me the biggest hurdles were debugging. When something goes wrong it has to be relatively easy to debug. I was in on the early days of RubyMotion and found that their debug facilities were not sufficient enough for me (I think I'm more towards the end of the early adopters curve.) It's also my understanding that this has improved drastically since the early days.

With all that said, the number of success stories that are coming out of RubyMotion has my attention (especially 37Signals). I will most certainly consider RubyMotion for any upcoming pet projets. I still won't use it in my business since you need someone versed in Ruby and partially in iOS, so until I have more developers with that skillset it's not worth going with something so esoteric since developers are so hard to come by as is.

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.

"I took an iOS class last year and got completely intimidated by Objective-C. It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things and in my mind’s eye any potential app idea I would want to work on was getting crushed before I could even take it seriously."

I want to call out this particular line: "It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things"

I dived into iOS development full on a couple of months back, and have to say, after extensive experience dealing with Android, BlackBerry and PhoneGap.. the iOS framework is phenomenal. I have found that more often than not you will NOT have to write a lot of code to do simple things (the same may even apply for seemingly complex things!).

It takes a little bit of getting used to, but after it all clicked, I feel like an idiot for feeling intimidated at all. To those that feel intimidated by the thought of iOS/Objective-C, I suggest diving in and giving it a shot. I promise, you'll love it.

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.

I was in the same boat as you. Now I'm nearing 2 years into being an iOS developer and I am in a ridiculous love affair with Objective-C + Cocoa. It is verbose, but so what? I've shown my code to non-iOS devs and even though they may not know how to make iOS apps, they could understand what every line of code of mine did.

iOS also helped solidify a lot of basic Computer Science concepts that other languages seemed to hand-hold me through. I'm extremely grateful for taking on learning Objective-C because I feel it matured me professionally.

I like Ruby, it's a great language, but I think projects like RubyMotion and Phonegap are born out of either fear or unwillingness to learn Objective-C + Cocoa. To me, unless RubyMotion is officially adopted by Apple, there will always be drawbacks to using it.

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