[MacRuby-devel] MacRuby promise delivered

[Andy Park]

I've been hacking on a fork of Interactive-MacRuby since a month or so ago, and as I now think I won't be able to find the time to distill my experience to a more presentable form any time soon, I'll just share my not-so-tidy work in progress and my current repl-based workflow in case others may find it useful and/or could take it further.

https://github.com/sohocoke/interactive-macruby/tree/temp-hack is the fork to which I added a few things:
- show (mac)ruby ivars inline when inspecting objects
- load_rc - loads my .irbrc and .macirbrc files
- load_repl - scans the app bundle for and load files with an .rb-repl extension
- load_src - relies on a (debug-only) global variable defined in the project's .rb-repl file, to reload the source of a class from the project's source (not bundle)

This gives me the ability to open a console window when I need to investigate my app at runtime, and to quickly load some infra to carry for investigation / fixing.

Then in my *rc files, I have, among other things, the following definitions:
- https://gist.github.com/1320400 - some routines that allow me to obtain quickly references to objects by their id or class
- https://gist.github.com/1393479 - some methods that can wrap existing methods for logging or additional investigative behaviour

I typically use these to find objects to which I add traces, add or replace behaviour, then when I think I got it right I edit the source in the XCode project and load the changed source. 

Obviously there are times when the changes need to be around events of the object that I cannot cleanly retrigger from a REPL, such as when nib wiring or awakeFromNib must be changed, so I still find myself restarting the debug session every now and then. But for small tweaks these facilities allow me to make changes and apply them in a relatively short cycle.

I also yearned for improved / prettier handling of the code I typed into the console as I was using Interactive-MacRuby, but now I'm mostly satisfied with one-line statements in the console, and reloading source after modifications if it spans a few lines.

Hope this is of interest to some. Thanks Eloy and others.
 

On 25 Nov 2011, at 01:28, Michael Johnston wrote:

> Thanks Eloy. I was playing with Interactive-MacRuby a bit last night.
> 
> I think the first step to using it would be to make a target to compile as a framework and make it cocoa pod-able. Then wiring up so can launch in app terminals with the app delegate or a particular window controller as top level object.
> 
> I was trying to figure out how to make it indent code as it is typed which irb does. Any thoughts on that?
> 
> Cheerio,
> 
> Michael Johnston
> lastobelus at mac.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 2011-11-24, at 2:13 PM, Eloy Duran wrote:
> 
>> Here’s a GUI approach to using macirb: https://github.com/alloy/Interactive-MacRuby
>> 
>> I didn’t have time to finish it yet, but it might still be useful.
>> 
>> On 24 nov. 2011, at 02:52, Michael Johnston wrote:
>> 
>>> I added basic fsevents reloading in my fork (https://github.com/lastobelus/MacRubyReload)
>>> 
>>> Should change to check an environment var first for list of directories to watch, and otherwise use project root. For now I just grabbed the dir of the rb_main.loc.txt entry.
>>> 
>>> I'm curious to experiment with automating the dynamic reloading of nib files. Anyone have any tips for that? The problem is that there are many patterns for using nibs, so it will be difficult to fully automate. But perhaps we can at least make it easy for common cases.
>>> 
>>> Another next step would be to attach a panel to any window with a running macirb in it whose top-level context is the window controller for that window. That might be actually fairly easy to do.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Cheerio,
>>> 
>>> Michael Johnston
>>> lastobelus at mac.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 2011-11-15, at 10:01 AM, Jean-Denis MUYS wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Following up on my Friday suggestion, I am happy to announce that I implemented a first version a Xcode MacRuby projects that dynamically reloads Ruby source code into a running application, allowing for a very dynamic incremental programming style.
>>>> 
>>>> go to https://github.com/jdmuys/MacRubyReload to download the project. The ReadMe.markDown text file gives full instructions.
>>>> 
>>>> Hopefully MacRuby Xcode templates can evolve to automatically provide a similar facility.
>>>> 
>>>> This is all very simple and very primitive. There is a lot of room for improvement. I also apologize for my Ruby style: I probably haven't written more than 100 or so lines of Ruby code overall yet.
>>>> 
>>>> I hope this gets the ball rolling.
>>>> 
>>>> Jean-Denis
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> MacRuby-devel mailing list
>>>> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
>>>> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
>>> 
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>> 
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