[MacRuby-devel] Getting from (Ruby)Cocoa to MacRuby?

[Laurent Sansonetti]

On Oct 26, 2008, at 12:27 AM, Rich Morin wrote:
> On a related topic, I'm wondering about the possibility of porting
> conventional (ie, ObjC) Cocoa apps _incrementally_ to MacRuby.  Is
> there a way, for example, to:
>
>  -  Turn an ObjC Cocoa app into a nominal MacRuby app, but leave
>     all of the actual code on ObjC.
>
>  -  Pick a class and method, comment out the ObjC code, and add
>     a MacRuby version that performs the same job.
>
>  -  See if things still work the same.
>
>  -  Rinse, repeat...

There is a way :-)

- You modify the project to link against MacRuby.framework
- You copy the main.m and rb_main.rb files from an existing MacRuby  
application (you will override the existing main.m file here, but  
rb_main.rb will be a new file)
- You add a build phase that copies all .rb files into the Resource  
directory of the application bundle
- Then you can start porting the code. You can start by converting a  
file into MacRuby (MyClass.[m|h] -> MyClass.rb), then remove the C/ 
Objective-C files from the project.

I did this process quite a few times when porting some Objective-C  
sample code into RubyCocoa/MacRuby. I don't think I forgot to mention  
a step.

Laurent