Ruby and Rails in Mac OS X Leopard
Someone / some people who have been responsible for integrating Ruby and Rails into the latest version of Mac OS X (Leopard) have written some notes on what was involved and how Ruby and Rails work in Leopard. The Ruby build is a customized 1.8.6 p36 and actually integrates into Xcode and Interface Builder.. now making it a relatively easy task to put together Ruby GUI apps on OS X. RubyGems is also installed with a smattering of the most popular gems preinstalled by default.
October 25, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Sounds very promising, can't wait to get my hands on Leopard (one more day...). :)
I've played a little with RubyCocoa, and while it seems to work just fine, the fact that it does not completely integrate with Interface Builder is a bit awkward. If Leopard addresses this, that would be perfect. I really hope that scripting languages like Ruby and Python can become first class citizens alongside the native Objective-C...
October 26, 2007 at 1:24 am
The Ruby improvements in Leopard are great, but I just noticed something on that MacPorts page... in the lower left corner: "Hosted by Apple".
So MacPorts is hosted -- and therefore more or less endorsed/supported -- by Apple. Sweet.
I don't know if that's been the situation for while or what... but I have been saying very loudly for the last year (and I haven't been a Mac OS X user for much longer than that) that what Apple REALLY needed to do was to get behind MacPorts and make it a lot easier for developers to get all the latest cutting edge open source tools.... basically to embrace open source and the bazaar model of software dev/dissemination.
It appears that they are basically doing that. Hooray!
[If this is old news and I'm just clueless, apologies... but I've bitched about this to a lot of Mac users and no one ever said "dude, MacPorts is backed by Apple.]
October 26, 2007 at 2:45 am
Installing some gems might not be as simple as usual, due to apple compiling Ruby as a universal binary.
Check http://www.notsostupid.com/blog/2007/10/25/ruby-leopard-and-gems/