Re: [Rubycocoa-talk] RubyCocoa or RubyObjC?

[Tim B. <tim...@gm...>]

Hi Dave,

It appears to me that RubyCocoa is in much better shape now than when  
I wrote most of my rubycocoa.com articles (in the first half of 2006)  
and the RubyObjC bridge (late last year).  That's been mainly due to  
Laurent's Apple-sponsored contributions and the increased community  
attention.  Remarkably, although it was first released in 2001, I  
could find no serious attempts to use RubyCocoa commercially prior to  
Rod Schmidt's PackRat and the Infurious SyncBridge (both in 2006).   
Like many other Ruby community projects, RubyCocoa was by and for  
hobbyists, and when I read its code, I found redundant  
implementations, unpruned dead-ends, and a lack of error-checking.   
As a result, it was difficult to write correct RubyCocoa programs.   
RubyCocoa also predated and didn't use many useful Ruby development  
tools like Rake and RDoc.

I wrote the RubyObjC bridge because I wanted a simpler bridge that  
would be more reliable for my own (commercial) purposes.  I was aware  
of Laurent's work at Apple, but needed a more stable and transparent  
bridge and was not particularly in need of Apple's major focus, it's  
new and comprehensive bridge support API.   Poor support for bindings  
was definitely one RubyCocoa shortcoming the time, and in general,  
reliability was a serious problem.  Also, performance was an issue  
for me; I use Ruby for prototyping and sometimes my intermediate  
implementations make a lot of bridge crossings; I've tuned RubyObjC  
to minimize bridge crossing times. I also wanted to have some  
confidence that the bridge that I used could be ported to non-Apple  
platforms if necessary; writing it from scratch helped a lot with  
that.  I was genuinely surprised by how quickly it came together; I  
started writing a Ruby wrapper for the Objective-C runtime in  
September and by RubyConf (late October) I was able to run all of my  
public and private RubyCocoa examples with RubyObjC.

As for the TextMate/Rake capabilities, the RubyObjC rake files are  
included in the RubyObjC distribution.  You are welcome to at least  
use them as a model to write rake tasks for RubyCocoa.   Perhaps the  
newcocoa project already has.

If you (or anyone) have more questions about RubyObjC, please email  
me directly or look for me at WWDC.

best regards,

Tim


On May 31, 2007, at 3:10 AM, Dave Baldwin wrote:

> I have been programming in Ruby for many years now but want to write
> some mac applications so RubyCocoa is an obvious choice.  In reading
> about this I came across Tim Burk's wonderful rubycocoa web site and
> quickly found he has done an alternative bridge called RubyObjC
> (www.rubyobjc.com).
>
> I am not trying to start a flame war here or anything, but this
> raises the question of which on to use?  RubyCocoa would seem the
> obvious choice as it is now under active development by Apple and
> will be included in Leopard so will make releasing applications
> easier.  RubyObjc came into existence   because RubyCocoa lacked some
> features or didn't work for some things (I don't think these are
> documented though).
>
> I am not sure of the time line but I suspect Tim started on RubyObjC
> before Apple started investing development effort into RubyCocoa and
> I wonder what the state of play is now - are the short comings in
> still present?
>
> I too use TextMate and Rake so a lot of the sentiments Tim expresses
> regarding not using xcode or  IB strike a chord with me, although no
> doubt some of these can be done with RubyCocoa as well.
>
> Dave.
>
>
>
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