Nitron

Introduction

Nitron is an opinionated, loosely-coupled set of RubyMotion components designed to accelerate iOS development, especially with simpler iOS apps. It provides meaningful abstractions atop the strong foundation present in the iOS SDK.

This first release focuses on making Storyboard-based workflows enjoyable.

Installation

Add the following line to your Gemfile:

gem "nitron"

If you haven't already, update your Rakefile to use Bundler. Insert the following immediately before Motion::Project::App.setup:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler'

Bundler.require

Example

A modal view controller responsible for creating new Tasks:

class TaskCreateViewController < Nitron::ViewController
  # The on class method is part of Nitron's Action DSL.
  # It wires the provided block to be an event handler for the specified outlet using the iOS target/action pattern.
  on :cancel do
    close
  end

  # Nitron emulates 'native' outlet support, allowing you to easily define outlets through Xcode.
  # The titleField and datePicker methods are created upon initial load by using metadata contained in the Storyboard.
  on :save do
    Task.create(title: titleField.text, due: datePicker.date)

    close
  end
end

Features

• Data Binding - declaratively bind your model data to controls, either via code or Interface Builder
• Outlet Support - expose controls to your controllers via Interface Builder
• Action Support - Ruby DSL to attach event handlers to outlets
• CoreData Models - beginnings of a CoreData model abstraction uses XCode's data modeling tools with an ActiveRecord-like syntax

If you notice, many of these features aim at slimming down your controllers. This is no accident: many iOS controllers have far too many responsibilities. Glue code is a perfect target for metaprogramming, so we're focusing on making beautiful controllers presently.

We're also careful to make these features modular, so you can mix them into your existing controllers as needed.

Tutorial

TBD

Examples

https://github.com/mattgreen/nitron-examples

Caveats

• Data binding doesn't use KVO presently. This is already in the works.
• Action support is limited to selecting a button or a table cell. Future releases will expand the DSL to support additional events.
• CoreData needs support for relationships and migrations.