[LRUG] FYI: Ruby for Symbian OS Released

[Romek Szczesniak]

http://developer.symbian.com/main/tools/opensrc/ruby/index.jsp

Ruby for Symbian OS
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 in advance of an upcoming 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

The POC will be available for S60 and UIQ.

http://developer.symbian.com/main/downloads/files/S60_Ruby_3rd.zip

Romek