[MacRuby-devel] PBI - MacRuby aux Fines Merbs...

[Rich Morin]

At 10:50 +0100 11/12/08, Eloy Duran wrote:
> One thing the "cowboys", from Rails for instance, have done right
> is that there are tests for almost everything, which is something
> that is seriously lacking atm imo.

Definitely.  I had intended to mention testing, but it got lost.  I
can't find much indication that Cocoa has anything like the panoply
of testing tools that Merb offers.  Some of these tools might be of
direct use to MacRuby; others might serve as inspirations.

If the Ruby community can demonstrate the feasibility and value of
test suites for Cocoa, it might be able to positively affect the
way development is done in the rest of the Cocoa community.


> I have not yet seen any well documented API in MacRuby, I must
> have missed it.  Could you explain which one(s) you mean?

MacRuby inherits the ObjC APIs, including documentation, from OSX.
Modulo a few accommodations in syntax, the documentation is quite
applicable to MacRuby.  And, if the Cocoa (etc) APIs are not well
documented, it is not due to lack of effort on Apple's part...

Of course, as Eloy points out in another thread, this documentation
is only useful to the extent that one is using MacRuby directly.  A
programmer who is using an abstraction layer such as HotCocoa would
need to dig through that layer to get to the relevant Cocoa calls,
then look up the appropriate documentation.


> These will at least be covered by Rucola again, once I have ported
> it to MacRuby.  But because this will be quite an effort I would
> like to know from Laurent/Rich if we will not be duplicating
> functionality.

It might be worthwhile to compare Rucola to Merb and see whether a
hybrid of some sort could be created.  Merb is developing a lot of
tooling; it would be very cool if MacRuby could use some of it.

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
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