23 October 2008

Symbian Boosts Developer Options
With Ruby Programming Language

Symbian has announced the release of Ruby for the Symbian OS, enabling developers to use the Ruby language to create applications for Symbian-based handsets and devices.

Symbian is releasing Ruby for Symbian OS to the Open Source software developer community. Ruby for Symbian OS brings the power of the Ruby programming language to the Symbian ecosystem under the terms of this Licence Agreement.

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.

Whilst no mass market application has yet to come from that direction, what does look certain is that Ruby is enjoying a growing popularity in different developer communities. Within these communities, there's also a curiosity to see how certain tasks can be coded elegantly or easily with dynamic languages.

According to the notes accompanying the release, Symbian officials said: "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."

David Wood, Symbian EVP of Research commented, "This project has been carried out in part to accelerate work on an EC-funded project, GREDIA, www.gredia.eu. At the same time we hope that we can benefit all Symbian developers and the Ruby community". John Pagonis, project lead from Pragmaticomm, said "It has been both fun and productive working with Ruby and open source on Symbian OS" Come and see Ruby 1.9 on Symbian OS for yourself!