

Show HN: Painless, productive views on iOS with Formotion for RubyMotion - 10char
http://clayallsopp.github.com/formotion/

======
_frog
This is one of those things that makes Rubymotion am increasingly attractive
prospect for me as an iOS developer. I wouldn't be ready to move off my
familiar Objective-C stack quite yet, but if more projects like this one come
along i might just consider it.

One thing I'm curious about is the support for TDD when using Rubymotion,
there's a lot of Rspec clones out there for Objective-C but they all feel a
bit hacky due to the language's less than stellar support for DSLs. On top of
that, testing doesn't seem to be all that big a deal in the iOS world. I'm
wondering if a healthy dose of the Ruby ethos changes this.

~~~
10char
Yes! RubyMotion ships with a port of Bacon, which removes all the friction
from testing in the traditional iOS stack (setting up Xcode, adding multiple
targets, verbosity...). Just have to add tests in ./specs and run 'rake spec'

Glance at the docs, especially the section about testing views. Much cleaner
API than anything in Objective-C: <http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-
center/articles/testing/>

(also a recent blog post on testing if you're still curious:
[http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/26489000626/functional-
view-...](http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/26489000626/functional-view-and-
controller-testing-with-rubymotion))

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poblano
How hard would it be to adapt this for Ruby written for iOS using RhoMobile?
I'm looking into whether to start learning RubyMotion vs. RhoMobile, and don't
know much about either yet.

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tjarmain
This is insanely awesome, thanks a lot!

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DenisM
I looked at page and could not figure out what it is. Is this a server-side
html generator? And AJAX library? A native iOS control library? I guess I will
never know.

~~~
10char
It's a library for RubyMotion <http://RubyMotion.com>

~~~
DenisM
Perhaps I did not make myself clear, so let me try again:

The posted article does nothing to describe what it is about to an average
person who will wander into it. Most people have no idea what is rubymotion,
and which problem it solves, or why they should care. Having read up on it
now, I suggest to try this instead:

 _Rubymotion is a toolchain for ruby developers to create native-looking,
native-performing, AppSore-compliant iOS apps. Formotion is a RubyMotion
library that provides for declarative UI layout description, making for much
faster UI development. At long last, Ruby devs can create first-class iOS apps
as quickly as they can create first-class web apps._

~~~
Kerrick
Most jQuery Plugins don't explain what jQuery is. Why should a RubyMotion
Library be responsible for explaining what rubyMotion is? At most, Formotion
they should link the word "RubyMotion" in their headmast to the RubyMotion
project website.

~~~
DenisM
Because one is well known and the other one is obscure:

<http://www.google.com/trends/?q=rubymotion,jquery>

~~~
jcoder
Ah it is googleable then. So whats the problem again?

