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

Ruby and Objective-C – a partnership


You must be wondering how Objective-C and Ruby can work together, as Objective-C is a compiled language and Ruby is an interpreted language. Then how come they work together in RubyMotion?

In reality, Objective-C in the iOS SDK not only has a compiler, but also has a runtime system to execute the compiled code. This runtime system acts as an interface for the Objective-C language; this is what makes the language work. RubyMotion takes advantage of the Objective-C runtime and our Ruby code interacts through this runtime system in just the same way as an Objective-C code does. That means Ruby and Objective-C are effectively working on top of the Objective-C runtime.

The preceding diagram represents the way RubyMotion and Objective-C work together in an iOS SDK ecosystem. In simple terms, this means we can access all iOS SDK classes with RubyMotion through the Objective-C runtime. The Foundation Framework is an Objective-C framework, but the great news is...