Can you use MacRuby to develop applications for th

Question

I have some basic familiarity with Objective-C, but prefer Ruby, so I'm thinking of playing around with MacRuby. Is it possible to use MacRuby to develop applications for the Mac App Store, or do I have to use Objective-C? (Note that I don't care so much about iOS/the iPhone and iPad store right now, just the Mac OS X app store.)

Answer 1

And to answer the actual question, yes, see http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2010-November/006475.html.

Answer 2

Short answer: Yes, you can, technically, build such an app. You need to revisit the store guidelines to know what requirements must be met to submit to the various stores.

This comes up sporadically; beyond the guidelines that @NSResponder mentioned, the reality is that you'll just be spending a lot of extra & unnecessary time if you decide to use MacRuby unless you plan on using some large chunk of already written Ruby code in your app.

Learning Objective-C is about 2% of the overall learning needed to be an effective Cocoa developer. The other 98% is everything from memory management model to standard idioms like KVC/KVO/delegation to NIB files to the myriad of classes & APIs throughout the system.

All of those things are written in Objective-C (or C) with documentation targeting Objective-C and examples written in Objective-C.

As well, the entire tool chain is focused on validating, compiling, indexing, debugging, and manipulating Objective-C.

If you want to use MacRuby to build a real Cocoa app, you are going to have to know Objective-C through and through anyway. And you are going to have to deal with whatever bugs and impedance mismatch is in the bridge layer, too.

Answer 3

Read the submission guidelines here: https://developer.apple.com/appstore/mac/resources/approval/guidelines.html

Answer 4

Yes. As the Mac developer forums says:

1. My Mac app is not written in Objective-C. Is this allowed on the MacApp Store?

Yes, provided it also adheres to the Mac App Store Review Guidelines at http://developer.apple.com/appstore/mac/resources/approval/guidelines.htmland the Mac Developer Program License Agreement at http://developer.apple.com/programs/terms/mac/mac_program_agreement_20101020.pdf

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