Cocoa for Ruby(ists) with MacRuby

October 28, 2008 by thilo

Apple’s Application Framework Cocoa gained popularity recently, also due to the iPhone. Like many others we started to learn Objective-C to play around with the iPhone a couple of months ago. The basic syntax is fairly easy to learn, also because lots of sources exist to get you up and running. But in my opinion the real challenge is to understand how the interface builder works

The past

But as a Rubyist the C like syntax of Objective-C was quite a pain. So I didn’t enjoy working with Objective-C. The existing Ruby bridge RubyCocoa has its own drawbacks. Especially moving parameter names into the method name to mimic Objective-C’s keyed arguments doesn’t appear future proof to me. This all kept me from getting deeper into the subject.

The future

In March this year MacRuby made its appearance as a successor for RubyCocoa. MacRuby is a port of Ruby 1.9 on top of the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, which aims to fix all of the RubyCocoa drawbacks and bring the full power of Ruby to the Cocoa framework. With the 0.3 release a couple of weeks ago, MacRuby now supports the Interface Builder, thus making it a full fledged member of the OS X Development tool chain. Since then MacRuby gained serious popularity. An official Apple Developer Connection Tutorial for “Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby” was published recently. More good tutorials can be found on the web, so I just link to them instead of writing another.

During the weekend I went through the first chapters of “Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX” with MacRuby instead of Objective-C to get familiar with the Cocoa library and Interface Builder. It went super smooth so far, I really had fun. Here is just a short example of the very first app out of the book to see how the code compares to objective-c.

class Foo
	attr_writer :text_field

	def seed(sender)
		@text_field.StringValue = "Generator doesn't need to be seeded ;)"
	end

	def generate(sender)
		@text_field.StringValue = (rand(100) + 1)
	end
end

^ Ruby vs. Objective-C v

@interface Foo : NSObject
{
  IBOutlet NSTextField *textField;
}

- (IBAction)gerneate:(id)sender;
- (IBAction)seed:(id)sender;
@end

@impelemtation Foo

- (IBAction)generate:(id)sender
{
  int generated = (random() % 100) +1;
  [textField setIntValue:generated];
}

- (IBAction)seed:(id)sender
{
  srandom(time(NULL));
  [textField setStringValue:@"Generator seeded"];
}
@end

As you can see you don’t need a header file and much less special characters. It even gets better, because you don’t need to call [[NSMutableArray alloc] init] but Array.new or just [] to initialize an empty Array. Isn’t Ruby beautiful? And with MacRuby you can have it for your Cocoa Apps too. So jump on board.

This entry was posted on October 28, 2008 by thilo.