[LRUG] FYI: Ruby for Symbian OS Released

[Murray Steele]

But the Ruby they've released is only for 2 of the 3 or 4 Symbian OS's out
there (UIQ and S60), which only covers <random_guess>1/2</random_guess> the
available Symbian phones (and that can't be a particularly large percentage
of all phones out there in the wild).  Given that, surely any Boss-Man is
going to say: "Yeah we could do it once in Ruby for those special Symbian
phones that support it and then again in J2ME for everyone else, or just do
it once using J2ME and save the time on the ruby version of the client for
making our server side part of the equation the market-beater."

I realise I'm being a complete nay-sayer here, but I suppose I don't see how
this project is particularly useful beyond the realm of the home-brew
scripts that Matthew mentioned, unless you were in some corporate realm
where you controlled the client (likely in the web-development arena, surely
not in the mobile-development arena).  I still think it's a 'Ooh! Neat!'
thing and if I had one of the supported handsets I would probably poke about
at it.

I guess I'm just a cheerful pessimist.

Muz

On 21/11/06, Eleanor <eleanor at goth-chic.org> wrote:
>
> On 21 Nov 2006, at 12:58, Murray Steele wrote:
> > I remember there being a big song-and-dance-routine in the Python
> > community a few years ago when Nokia* did the same for Python.  And
> > yet for all the hoo-ha, I can't think of anything good / useful /
> > big coming out of it for the Python community.  For example games
> > for phones seem to be actively advertised as Java games nowadays,
> > as if that some-how makes them better.  It might be silly but it
> > does point at a certain ubiquity of J2ME in that area in that you
> > don't see the word Python in those full-page ringtone / games /
> > wallpapers ads (unless it's for a wallpaper of a python for the
> > niche ophiophilist market).
> >
> > Maybe the effect was felt in the Python community in ways I
> > couldn't detect (by virtue of not being part of it anymore), so if
> > anyone who knows more than me about this (e.g. anything at all) can
> > re-educate me otherwise, by all means feel free.
> >
> > Muz
> >
> > *or was it Symbian? I think it was just for Nokia phones, but maybe
> > back then only Nokia phones ran the Symbian OS
>
> For Symbian, and last I followed that project it was Python 1.5.2 but
> without many of the standard libraries. There's also Perl for Symbian
> available from Freepoc (spot the former Psion Series 5 addict).
>
> This probably won't do much for the broader Ruby community but for
> those of us working on projects that include support for next-gen
> handsets this is brilliant news as the Ruby advantage means we can
> bring all kinds of goodies to the Symbian platform with much less
> effort than the J2ME crowd. One step closer to the dream of Ruby as a
> universal scripting language for embedded systems :)
>
> Ellie
>
>
> Eleanor McHugh
> Games With Brains
> ----
> raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason
>
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