Labels: android , iphone , LBS , location based services , wenear
Showing posts with label iphone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iphone. Show all posts
Here you can watch a video by a Sun engineer talking about the plans to port the JVM to the iPhone. I believe this can increase the available applications for the iPhone tenfold overnight. The challenge would be to make full use of the iPhone features like the multi touch interface and the accelerometer.
I bet many of you have already seen the iPhone SDK presentation already. I believe that many will be tempted by the platform. There are barriers for entry though. You have to do all development on a Mac, you have to have an iPhone (emulators are not for production testing), you have to be a partner in the Apple developer program and you have to write code in Objective-C.
Objective what? Objective-C is a language that sits on top ofC++ C. It has some dynamic features and the syntax will instantly remind you of
SmallTalk. Actually I shrug to the idea of writing code that looks like SmallTalk with C++ like constructs. Sounds like sweet and sour Chinese food
to me (it reminds me of the ugly "new" operator that is off place in Javascript). But Apple has done a great job with Cocoa (the MacOS X interface toolkit) and CocoaTouch (the one designed for touch interfaces, iPhone, iPodTouch and soon iTablet). The API is very elegant and clean (I still yearn for the BeOS API though, will always do).
OK, what does this have to do with Ruby? Well, a very interesting project popped up in the Ruby core list recently. Apparently, Apple is integrating the whole of Ruby1.9 into the Objective-C runtime and it is calling the package MacRuby. Ruby code will have access to all Cocoa interfaces and vice-versa. This project is an open source one but is being spearheaded by Apple. All those actively contributing right now are Apple engineers. They are trying to expand the interfaces to their APIs and thus cater for more developers.
Will we ever see an iPhone shipping with MacRuby? Will we be able to write Cocoa Touch interfaces in Ruby? Imagine that, I will no longer be ashamed that I don't know shoes!
Objective what? Objective-C is a language that sits on top of
SmallTalk. Actually I shrug to the idea of writing code that looks like SmallTalk with C++ like constructs. Sounds like sweet and sour Chinese food
to me (it reminds me of the ugly "new" operator that is off place in Javascript). But Apple has done a great job with Cocoa (the MacOS X interface toolkit) and CocoaTouch (the one designed for touch interfaces, iPhone, iPodTouch and soon iTablet). The API is very elegant and clean (I still yearn for the BeOS API though, will always do).
OK, what does this have to do with Ruby? Well, a very interesting project popped up in the Ruby core list recently. Apparently, Apple is integrating the whole of Ruby1.9 into the Objective-C runtime and it is calling the package MacRuby. Ruby code will have access to all Cocoa interfaces and vice-versa. This project is an open source one but is being spearheaded by Apple. All those actively contributing right now are Apple engineers. They are trying to expand the interfaces to their APIs and thus cater for more developers.
Will we ever see an iPhone shipping with MacRuby? Will we be able to write Cocoa Touch interfaces in Ruby? Imagine that, I will no longer be ashamed that I don't know shoes!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
