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Ruby for Symbian OS

October 2008: Symbian Research and Pragmaticomm are pleased to announce the availability of Ruby v1.9 for Symbian OS.

Introduction

 Symbian is releasing Ruby for Symbian OS to the Open Source software developer community.

Ruby is a powerful dynamic language that reaches the heights of the pure Object Oriented Programming paradigm and gives a wealth of language features like exceptions, blocks, closures, regular expressions, collections, meta-classing and much more. Ruby is enjoying a growing popularity in different developer communities.

Ruby for Symbian OS brings the power of the Ruby programming language to the Symbian ecosystem under the terms of this Licence Agreement.

Ruby 1.9 Distribution

Symbian Research has been extended the initial port of Ruby v1.9 which was carried out under the auspices of the GREDIA EU-funded project (FP6 34363 - Grid enabled access to Rich mEDIA content)  by Pragmaticomm.

Downloads

Ruby 1.9 binaries, with release notes and basic instructions Example scripts

Please note that this software is of very early beta quality, and although the current implementation is reasonably stable, potential developers and contributors should be aware of certain outstanding issues.
 
This Ruby 1.9 implementation replaces the earlier Ruby 1.8 implementation.

More information on the Ruby programming language can be found at:

Source Code

 A read-only source-code repository for this release can be found on the Pragmaticomm's source server.

This repository also contains the earlier version of the Ruby 1.9 VM for Symbian OS, developed for use in the GREDIA project - the Symbian Research release above has augmented the earlier GREDIA version with:
  • A new, more user friendly launcher
  • Extensions that enable to use of camera and video functionality for Ruby programmers
  • A prototype implementation for adding dynamic extensions to Ruby

Feedback and Discussion Forum

 We'd love to hear what you think of Ruby and how we can improve the implementation on Symbian OS. There's lots more work to do so if you want to get involved please get in touch.

There is an SDN forum where you can discuss Ruby issues and future work. Topics in this forum can relate to various runtime environments and languages, so please remember to tag any Ruby-related contributions with the label "Ruby". If you don't already have access to SDN then you will need to register before using the forum.