This article, and the second installment that follows next week, can be considered the fourth and fifth in a series covering Ruby programming on Mac OS X. However, unlike the first three articles of this series, this tutorial can be used as a standalone piece. You only need some knowledge of the Ruby programming language with a little prior experience in Xcode to understand the content found here.
An Introduction to RubyCocoa, Part 1
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
There are similar projects in languages other than Ruby.
For Python: http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/
For Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net/
IMO PyObjC is very mature.
I mean, ObjC is cool in itself, and with all those funky languages..
Maybe I’m the only people who wishes he had a mac to program it :/
pyobjc seems really mature sure, but I wonder if it does mix and match with ObjC like ruby does (the latest two are very similar indeed)
Not much seems to be happening with Camelbones.
I’m more interested in the Perl/Objective-C bridge from Apple, but there’s been almost no information about it. I know it doesn’t support the GUI directly, but I was hoping it would be possible to put something together in Interface Builder, then use the bridge to move data over to work with; such as converting NSArrays to Perl @rrays.
Well, gcc includes Objective-C, you know.
And the GNUstep project implements Cocoa : http://www.gnustep.org (with existing binding for java, ruby)
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/
it was a lot of fun, wrote a small file manager in under 1500 lines, and using Interface Builder to boot. The long long method names kind of bugs me though, but thats a Cocoa/named arguments thing anyway.
RubyCocoa and PyObjC are great for Ruby and Python programmers who need to access Cocoa. But I don’t find them so great for Cocoa programmers wanting some sort of scripting environment. The syntax for method invocation in Ruby and Python does not fit at all with the keyword selectors we have in Objective-C. And the separate object models (even with nice bridges) make things more complex and brittle. I prefer using F-Script ( http://www.fscript.org ) which is better integrated with Cocoa.