Ruby for Symbian OS
NEWS UPDATE: Read the announcement about the port of the new Ruby 1.9 Virtual Machine to Symbian OS v9, which was demoed at the Smartphone Show.
Introduction
Symbian is releasing Ruby for Symbian OS to the Open Source software developer community. Ruby for Symbian OS brings the power of the Ruby programming language to the Symbian ecosystem under the terms of this Licence Agreement.
The package includes the Ruby source code (based on Ruby 1.8.5), bundled in a straight forward launcher application. An initial prooof-of-concept module has been added also. Documentation and example code will be added in the future as the project evolves.
Why Ruby?
Ruby for Symbian OS is being released together with a series of articles about Runtime environments on Symbian OS.
Ruby is a powerful dynamic language that reaches the heights of the pure Object Oriented Programming paradigm and gives a wealth of language features like exceptions, blocks, closures, regular expressions, collections, meta-classing and much more.
Whilst no mass market application has yet to come from that direction, what does look certain is that Ruby is enjoying a growing popularity in different developer communities. Within these communities, there's also a curiosity to see how certain tasks can be coded elegantly or easily with dynamic languages.
Symbian's role in the Ruby project
This project is another step in the evolution of Ruby, and Symbian is happy to provide this code to the open source community, which can then decide on how Ruby will evolve as a mobile platform.
The large collection of Ruby resources means that Symbian does not need to teach the Ruby language. However, it is our intent to suggest a framework to extend Ruby with mobile libraries.
While the Ruby language will give you the computation and techinical playground, the mobile libraries which you can create will be the actual enablers to a variety of applications such as games, tools, PIMs and much more.
Symbian will provide the project with an initial proof-of-concept (POC) library that can do:
- Rendering
- Messaging
- Persistence