Sproutcore on Ubuntu 8.04

I was interested in the Sproutcore (ref: http://www.sproutcore.com) package that got some attention from the Apple developers conference. (AppleInsider article / MacBreak weekly podcast where Sproutcore is talked about)

Getting it to work on Ubuntu (verison 8.04 for me) took a few steps I thought I would place here. Of course first you need to make sure you have Ruby gems and Rails installed.

apt-get install rubygems rails

one items you may miss to install though is the dev package. Be sure to do

apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

This will show itself when Ruby trys to build native extensions with an error like:

extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)

once you have this done you can do:

gem install sproutcore

and accept all its questions (it will take a while as several packages need to be installed)

At this point you will need to:

cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/sproutcore-0.9.10/bin
chmod 755 *

to make these scripts executable and also add this location to your path with:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/sproutcore-0.9.10/bin:$PATH

or just add them to your shell init scripts like .bashrc

At this point you can start down the tutorial examples at: http://www.sproutcore.com/documentation/hello-world-tutorial/

take care
Doug

[update]
After talking with my friend Josh I thought I should add in a little note pointing to information related to Objective-J by 280North of 280Slides development as another data point in some of this Javascript talk.