RubyMotion for Android public beta has been released. It was announced during the RubyMotion annual conference held in San Francisco.
According to official release, RubyMotion for Android is available free for all customers. It is not yet ready for production use. However, the company encourages developers to use the beta build and report feedback abd bugs. The inputs provided by the developers will be used to build the final release.
RubyMotion for Android apps has been developed in such a way that they are statically compiled into ARM machine code using our ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler. The compiler provides support for both armv5te and armv7 architectures.
RubyMotion for Android runtime provides support for both Dalvik and ART. It also includes a new implementation of Ruby based on Java. The public beta of RubyMotion supports Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 and L (latest).
The command-line interface of RubyMotion for Android features an interactive console that works on both the Android emulator and a USB-connected device. It works by doing remote JIT compilations from the Mac to ARM.
“RubyMotion for Android apps can also vendor third-party Java libraries (jar files) and can be submitted to the Google Play store”, mentions the official blog post.
Some of the important features slated to be introduced in the upcoming versions of RubyMotion are mentioned below
- Performance Improvements
- New Ruby classes and methods
- Linux Support based on Feedback
- Support for Android APIs (such as Android Wear, Android Car etc)
In order to install RubyMotion for Android public beta, you should run the following command
$ sudo motion update
$ sudo motion update –pre
RubyMotion for Android will be great platform for Ruby developers who would like to build Android Apps.