Book Image

RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials

Book Image

RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials

Overview of this book

RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS app development. With RubyMotion, you can quickly develop and test native iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad, combining the expressiveness and simplicity of Ruby with the power of the iOS SDK. "RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials" is a hands-on guide for developing iOS apps using RubyMotion. With RubyMotion, you can eliminate the complexity and confusion associated with the development of iOS applications using Objective-C. We'll begin from scratch. Starting by installing RubyMotion, we'll build ourselves up to developing an app that uses the various device capabilities iOS has to offer. What's more, we'll even learn how to launch your app on the App Store! We'll also learn to use iOS SDK classes to create application views. Discover how to use the camera, geolocation, gestures, and other device capabilities to create engaging, interactive apps. We'll develop stunning user interfaces faster with the XCode interface builder and make web apps by using WebView. We'll then augment applications with RubyMotion gems, doing more by writing less code and learn how to write test cases for RubyMotion projects. Finally, we'll understand the app submission process to push your app to Apple's App Store With "RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials", we will learn how to create iOS apps with ease. At the end of each chapter we will have a tangible and running app, which utilizes the concepts we have learnt in that chapter.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
RubyMotion iOS Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What is RubyMotion?


RubyMotion is a toolchain that allows developers to develop native iOS applications using the Ruby programming language. RubyMotion acts as a compiler that interacts with the iOS SDK (Software Development Kit). This gives us enormous power to make use of Apple libraries; therefore, once the application has compiled and loaded, the device has no idea whether it's an application made using Objective-C or RubyMotion.

RubyMotion is a product of HipByte, founded by Laurent Sansonetti.

Note

Laurent Sansonetti is a former Apple employee and the brain behind MacRuby. MacRuby is the implementation of Ruby on top of Mac OS X core technologies, which was maintained by Apple for over 4 years. And the best part is that RubyMotion is based on MacRuby.

While developing applications with RubyMotion using Ruby, you always have access to the iOS SDK classes. This gives you the benefit of even mixing Objective-C and Ruby code, as RubyMotion implements Ruby on top of the Objective-C runtime and iOS Foundation classes.

This is how a typical RubyMotion application works. The code written in RubyMotion is fully compiled into machine code, so the application created by RubyMotion is as fast as the one created using Objective-C.