Rapid Android development with JRuby

how-to
Oct 3, 20111 min

A few interesting pieces of data:

  • 70% of the world’s population has a mobile phone
  • over a million Android devices are activated weekly
  • 1/2 of all local searches are done on a mobile device
  • over 90% of mobile Internet access is social media related

Clearly, if you aren’t building mobile apps today, you will be soon.

And if you want to build Android apps as fast as people can consume them, then I recommend you check out Ruboto, a framework that leverages the power of JRuby to enable you to quickly build and deploy Android apps. As you’ll see, with the expressiveness of Ruby and the full stack nature of this Rails-like framework, you can go from idea to device in short-order.

Follow along as some hipster (hint, he’s the coolest disco dancer you read about all the time or at least right this instant) demonstrates using the Ruboto framework to rapidly build and deploy Android applications. See how to create an emulator instance, create a Ruboto project using the command line, code your app, and use a location listener for obtaining GPS information.

andrew_glover

When Andrew Glover isn't listening to “Funkytown” or “Le Freak” he enjoys speaking on the No Fluff Just Stuff Tour. He also writes articles for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and O'Reilly’s ONJava and ONLamp portals. Andrew is also the co-author of Java Testing Patterns, which was published by Wiley in September 2004; Addison-Wesley’s Continuous Integration; and Manning’s Groovy in Action.

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