Symbian Boosts Developer Options with Ruby

LONDON—Symbian 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.

At the Symbian Smartphone Show here, Symbian announced that Symbian Research and Pragmaticomm have collaborated to provide the availability of Ruby Version 1.9 for Symbian OS. In addition, Symbian is releasing Ruby for Symbian OS to the open-source software developer community.

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."

Pragmaticomm is a London-based software consultancy that brings "deep knowledge of infrastructure, software engineering, systems deployment and operational issues to the table," the company's Web site states. The company is an Accredited Symbian Developer that focuses on mobile and embedded systems, as well as enterprise applications and enterprise security and infrastructure.

Of the Symbian move, blogger Jon Erickson at Dr. Dobbs, said:

"The downloads include the Ruby 1.9 binaries, with release notes and basic instructions, and a read-only source-code repository for this release can be found on the Pragmaticomm's source server. This repository also contains the earlier version of the Ruby 1.9 VM for Symbian OS, developed for use in the GREDIA project; Symbian Research release above has augmented the earlier GREDIA version with:

A new launcher,

extensions that enable the use of camera and video functionality for Ruby programmer,

and a prototype implementation for adding dynamic extensions to Ruby."