What Ruby based mobile cross-platform solution to use? [closed]

Question

I'm looking at ways to use Ruby for mobile cross-platform development. We need support for at least Android en iOS, with Windows Phone and Blackberry support as nice to have. It'll be an app that will end up in the app stores for the general public, so it's not an enterprisey in-house only thing. So far I've found:

• Rhodes, covers all the platforms mentioned and open source. We don't need the extra (paid) functionality from RhoMobile right now
• RubyMotion; iOS only and costs 199 dolla, unfortunately there's no trial version available
• Ruboto, Android only and open source
• MobiRuby, iOS only with Android support planned, open source, but looks like it's not mature enough at the time of writing for our needs

We also have a must-have use case in which we need access both the camera and the accelerometer simultaneously and draw data from the accelerometer on screen. Because this is so specific, it's not supported in any cross-platform framework I've looked at (including others like Phonegap, Titanium, etc) and it looks like I'll need to write native code for each platform to get this working.

So far I'm inclined to choose Rhodes. It's a proven framework and seems to be able to do everything I need, including 'going native' for the aforementioned use case. Another option would be to use both RubyMotion and Ruboto, which are both solutions to write Ruby instead of Objective-C or Java. In theory I should be able to share common code (like connectivity and storage) across platforms, although I couldn't find any examples of anybody successfully using these two for writing an app that works on both Android and iOS.

I'm wondering if somebody can confirm my thinking or that I've overlooked something. Any additional insights are welcome of course.

Answer 1

If you choose Ruboto, you can use your UI-independent Ruby code as is. The UI code will most likely be platform-dependent anyway.

Ruboto is still young, but there are more projects starting to use it. One example is

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jonsoft.globalchat

It shares the communication Ruby code across platforms.

being one of the developers on the Ruboto project, I can promise you good support and the full Ruby experience.

For iOS RubyMotion looks good, but I have not used it. You should be able to use a shared code base for common logic, but separate code bases for the UI and for accessing sensors.