Obj-C Compiler for Ruby

The ObjCCompiler module compiles your Obj-C classes into bundles and requires them so you can use them from Ruby.

There are a number of ways to load classes defined from Cocoa into Ruby. The solution presented here works best if the classes written in Obj-C are also meant to be used from Ruby. The solution requires RubyCocoa and assumes that you've written your application using Rucola.

Example

Let's assume you're working on a project that implements a Match class that wraps SearchKit matches. And you have a match.m somewhere in your lib directory.

Your implementation needs one extra line, this function is invoked by the Ruby interpreter when you try to load a bundle.

lib/search_kit/match.m

void Init_Match() {}

After that you need to

1. Compile your code to a bundle
2. require the code
3. Import the class into the namespace

We've wrapped these three steps into one method.

test/unit/match_test.rb

ObjCCompiler.require('lib/search_kit/match', 'WebKit')

Sometimes you might want to write a part of the class in Ruby, note that your Obj-C class ended up in the OSX namespace, so you might need to assign it to a new constant.

lib/search_kit/match.rb

module SearchKit
  Match = OSX::Match
  
  class Match < OSX::NSObject
    def inspect
      "#<SearchKit::Match:#{object_id} score=#{score}>"
    end
  end
end

Copyright © 2009 Fingertips, Eloy Duran <eloy@fngtps.com>, Manfred Stienstra <manfred@fngtps.com>