Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if it is possible to write JRuby android applications? It would seem a natural fit given Java etc etc. I do relate to the comment ""If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code" so I have been looking for a better way to do it. Though, I have lately resigned myself to the fact that I may well have to write Java again...

As an aside...does anyone have experience with PhoneGap or Appcelerator? Wondering about experiences with those approaches (both positive and negative).

You might want to check out Ruboto. I haven't used it yet, but it seems to allow you to do exactly what you want, i.e. write full Android apps using JRuby. I've heard there's a significant performance penalty, though.

http://ruboto.org/

I've also heard of people having success using Mirah to write Android apps. The syntax is very similar to Ruby, so it will be comfortable for you. It compiles to a straight Java class with no runtime dependencies, so you don't get the performance hit you run into with Ruboto.

http://www.mirah.org/

WTF? In the Mirah examples, I see a bunch of

  i = 0
  while i < 10
    ...code...
    i += 1
  end

There's no for loop? I couldn't confirm because I didn't find a manual.

Check out ruboto-core at http://ruboto.org/

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