2008-02-17

First Couple of Weeks of CocoaRuby

or Ruby-Cocoa for that matter.

Cocoa is the default framework for writing applications for Mac OS X, and the default language for Mac OS X development is Objective-C. Ruby is the latest programming language that is taking the programming community by storm. On one hand, Objective-C offers the best performance for Mac applications. On the other hand, Ruby wins in terms of programming productivity hands down. Just look at the number of blog posts on Ruby-on-Rails.

The Cocoa-Ruby bridge offers programmers who are comfortable - not necessarily very fluent - in both Objective-C and Ruby the productivity gains of using Ruby for creating Mac applications. Yes, you do have to know the Cocoa API, too.

It turns out Cocoa-Ruby is preinstalled in the Xcode3 that comes Developer Tools for Leopard. The default Xcode2 in Tiger does not support Ruby. I had the impression a Leopard migration was necessary to do Ruby coding. Happily, I found out that I just had to download Xcode version 2.5 to perform Ruby coding under Tiger. I've downloaded and built a few Ruby Mac sample apps so far.

Now, to build my first "original" Ruby app...

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