RubyCocoa

Since I had some free time this week, I wanted to brush up on some Cocoa programming. However, I have not been using Objective-C for some time and would rather not have to program in it. Instead, I decided to use Ruby via the RubyCocoa. I have always had great difficulties installing RubyCocoa on my machine. It never seems to just work. I recall getting version 0.4.3 to work somehow over Spring but the steps seem to elude me now.

I tried searching on the web but there was no clear answer. Even the installation instructions for RubyCocoa seems incomplete (and might even be auto-translated from the Japanese version). Anyway, I downloaded the source code for version 0.5 and follow the instructions to do ruby install.rb config and ruby install.rb setup. The installation failed -- it was not able to locate some of the symbols.

So I reread the instructions on the website. There was some mention of using Ruby 1.8.5. and I only had version 1.8.4 installed. Since Ruby 1.8.5 has been out for some time, I decided to upgrade my version. There are various discussions on what needs to be done to get Ruby 1.8.5 to compile on OS X but I stuck with the instructions from HiveLogic and just substituted the latest version Ruby into the instructions. Everything works fine, even readline. I had to recompile RMagick though since the links were broken after the upgrade. Some might also find the instructions here useful for upgrading.

I followed the steps on the RubyCocoa website and tried to build RubyCocoa. It still was not working. Then I realized something. I was actually issuing the following command: sudo ruby install.rb config --build-universal. I removed the build-universal just to try the default settings. And it WORKED! I am not sure how the developers themselves got the universal binary to build but it was not working on my machine. Right now, RubyCocoa is not a universal binary but that matters little. At least it is finally working.

It's always the simple things that make life so complicated. It also shows that one should always try the default values for configure. After all this, I really think I should have just stuck with rereading some Objective-C. RubyCocoa is a very nice framework but it takes a lot of guess work to get it working. However, as a consolation, I finally got Ruby 1.8.5 installed.