The RubyMotion tool chain, which allows developers to write iPhone, iPad and OS X apps in Ruby, will support Android development with Ruby in its upcoming release.
In a blog post, the RubyMotion team announced that RubyMotion 3.0, which will be released later this year, features support for the Android platform, allowing Android developers to write apps in Ruby rather than Java.
(Related: Xamarin 3 native app development platform released)
While Android app creation and management are identical to the existing iOS and OS X processes, RubyMotion 3.0 will feature a new Ruby runtime specifically for Android development, which shares no code with the Objective-C runtime. The object model is based on Java, with Ruby classes, objects, methods and exceptions mirroring Java with no bridge involved.
RubyMotion for Android runs an LLVM-based static compiler transforming Ruby source files into ARM machine code, with the apps packaged as .apk archives, as is standard with Java apps.
The blog post also gave developers a sneak peek of RubyMotion for Android sample code apps to encourage developer volunteers to test the new features in early builds of RubyMotion 3.0, which will begin seeding in early July.
