Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
The Rhodes framework brings Ruby to many smartphone platforms, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and with the upcoming 1.0 release Android. We talked to Adam Blum of Rhomobile about what's coming in the 1.0 release, real world applications using Rhodes and the new RhoHub service.
Rhodes, an open source toolkit, allows to write Ruby client applications for mobile phones, currently the iPhone, Windows Mobile and RIM BlackBerry. By bundling a version of the Ruby runtime, it even gets around the restrictions of the iPhone, and also gets access to GPS, and other features. We talked to Adam Blum of Rhomobile about the technology behind Rhodes and how to write apps.
Writing a Ruby parser is a challenging task, yet the XRuby team wrote one from scratch. A Google Summer of Code project will update the current parser to use ANTLR v3, and plans to produce a Ruby parser in Ruby in the process. InfoQ caught up with Wang Haofei to ask about the problems in parsing Ruby and the plans for the project.
Besides JRuby, the XRuby project is hard at work to bring Ruby to the JVM. It's different in that it's a Ruby to Java bytecode compiler, whereas JRuby currently uses an AST-based interpreter, together with some JIT compilation. InfoQ caught up the XRuby developers for a status report, and invited the JRuby team to offer their opinions on cooperation opportunities.
