The concept of mobile devices accessing the Web is one that Ruby on Rails developers must be aware of today. Making your application available and easy to use for smartphones and Pocket PCs becomes an excellent opportunity to create a compelling product and gain significant market share. Ruby on Rails, with its well-defined RESTful conventions, is an ideal backend for mobile applications. Mobile app developers can make use of mobile and web technologies as it is quite easy to take advantage of Ruby-experienced mobile development SDKs and frameworks.
For a quick and effective start, both Ruby developers and mobile app developers should become familiar with Ruby development tools and smartphone compatibility. In this article, I tried to give a brief overview of the most popular tools that help build Ruby apps for mobile devices, including Rhodes for cross-platform apps, Ruboto for Android, IronRuby for Windows Mobile, and MacRuby for Apple iOS.
Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with Rhodes
The closest Rails-like tool that Ruby on Rails developers can use to build Ruby applications for all major mobile operating systems is Rhodes. It is based on Web technologies and is intended for Web developers and mobile application developers who want to apply their Ruby development skills to the world of mobile applications. Rhodes is an open source framework that allows you to create native but cross-platform applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian smartphones using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Rhodes Apps showcase the performance and richness of native apps, while enabling mobile app developers to have the productivity of HTML web interfaces.
The tool also allows Ruby developers to create apps that use built-in smartphone features, such as geo-positioning information, camera access, and personal information management. Ruby on Rails developers will get a quick start with Rhodes and can be productive in a matter of days. Following the trend of accessing the development environment in the cloud, the creators of Rhodes launched RhoHub, the next generation of development as a service for mobile platforms. RhoHub enables mobile app developers to build cross-platform Ruby apps online without installing SDKs for various smartphones locally.
Ruboto: JRuby for Android
The Android mobile platform only supported Java until recently. Now Ruby developers can also take advantage of it using Ruboto, an Android development package that allows you to build applications using JRuby. Ruboto harnesses the power of JRuby to open the Android API. Mobile app developers can edit, save, and run scripts on the phone; access Preferences, SQLite, Media, Phone Status, Sensors, UI and much more.
Ruboto introduces the Application Builder command line tool, which is basically a Ruby application generator for Ruboto applications. Although not fully functional for building complicated Ruby applications, this development package is great for testing, prototyping, and debugging.
Iron Ruby for Windows Mobile
IronRuby brings Ruby natively to the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that runs on top of .NET. IronRuby supports all features of the Ruby language. It also provides Ruby and .NET Framework code integration. Iron Ruby allows you to run Ruby on Rails development scenarios, such as migrating a database, generating a model, etc. Ruby developers can browse the Rails documentation page on the IronRuby website to see the various scenarios in action.
The combination of IronRuby and the new Windows Phone 7 platform brings many possibilities to .NET Framework developers, mobile app developers, and Ruby developers. You can expect .NET developers to benefit from the incredible power of the Ruby language, and Ruby on Rails developers, in turn, to be able to write mobile apps for Windows Mobile more conveniently.
MacRuby
The lifting of Apple’s restrictions on iPhone app development using languages other than Objective-C is a big step forward for the mobile development industry. Mobile app developers and Ruby developers interested in building iPhone apps should familiarize themselves with MacRuby. It is a complete Ruby environment that can be used to build and run your Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. The current version exceeds 90% of the total RubySpecs. Ruby classes in MacRuby are actually Objective-C classes, and Ruby objects are actually Objective-C objects. Since it is not yet possible to fully express Ruby semantics with the Objective-C runtime, the MacRuby team still has a lot of work to do. While this work is in progress, the goal of MacRuby is to allow mobile app developers to create solutions that don’t sacrifice performance to enjoy the benefits of using Ruby.
As you can see, there are many tools that help Ruby on Rails developers implement their skills in creating mobile applications for various platforms. With a little time and patience to study the quirks of various platforms and frameworks, mobile app developers could build functional apps using their current knowledge of Ruby.
Currently, Ruby for mobile still has many limitations, but it holds great promise. In many cases, it could be very useful for mobile app developers looking to implement richer capabilities into their mobile web apps.
