Podcast Interview With iPhone Wax Creator Corey Johnson
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This interview is with Corey Johnson, creator of iPhone Wax. iPhone Wax is an open-source project that lets developers build native CocoaTouch based applications using Lua. Lua’s an expressive scripting language with dynamic language features familiar to Ruby and Python developers.
The interview includes content on iPhone Wax’s genesis, the Lua language, embedding and bridging Lua and the Objective-C runtime, performance, debugging, App Store policy and interpreted code, and what’s next for the project.
You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.
For easy scanning of the interview, here’s what was covered and when:
- 0:30 – Genesis of iPhone Wax
- 2:00 – Why Lua: scoped closures, garbage collection, clean syntax, easy to embed
- 4:00 – Embedding Lua in an iPhone app
- 5:30 – Bridging Lua to CocoaTouch
- 9:00 – Garbage collection of Objective-C objects from Lua
- 10:00 – Lua code as delegates for protocols and other callbacks
- 13:45 – Debugging
- 14:45 – Performance
- 16:00 – Benefits of using scoped closures
- 17:15 – Easy HTTP and JSON
- 19:15 – TextMate bundle
- 21:00 – App Store approvals
- 22:30 – Future: inspiration from HotCocoa and Why The Lucky Stiff’s “Shoes”
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