We started checking out Rhodes a year ago when using Snow Leopard as a development platform, and developed some trial apps. At that time, Rhodes used to be a simple gem that could be downloaded using the compatible Ruby (v 1.8.7) and rvm. Since I recently upgraded to Lion, I thought I'd give Rhodes another spin to see if it had changed. Indeed, I found that RhoMobile has grown by leaps and bounds, and that Rhodes is now a small part of a much larger scheme of things: Rhodes now ships within Motorola's Rhomobile Suite which includes, apart from Rhodes, an IDE called RhoStudio for developing RhoMobile applications, and two other frameworks called RhoConnect and RhoElements.
In this post I'll explain how I went about setting up Rhodes 3.3.3 from the RhoMobile suite and running the sample APIs app for Rhodes (included with the RhoStudio installer) on iOS and Android simulators using the RhoStudio IDE.
Installing the Prerequisites
XCode
Here, we select the relevant iOS device simulators and XCode command line tools, which is a prerequisite of installing RVM on OS X.
Note: if you don't want to develop for iOS and still want to install RVM (without installing XCode, as it is a heavy download), then you might need to install the gcc compiler for Mac to proceed.
Android SDK
RVM and Ruby
Java Development Kit (JDK)
Installing RhoMobile Suite, RhoStudio and Rhodes
gem install rhomobile-debug
gem install "/Volumes/Motorola RhoMobile Suite Installer/.gems/rhodes-3.3.3.gem"
gem install rhodes-translator
Building and Running the sample APIs application
Within the Rhomobile suite installer downloaded earlier, go to samples and copy the rhodes-system-api-folder to your workspace folder specified earlier. In RhoStudio, import the project by selecting File > Import > Existing Project into workspace. Choose the root folder as the workspace directory to see the project in the list. Select the project and click Finish. The project should now be listed in the Project Explorer.
Using the Android simulator
After the installing the SDK platform, we also need to install the 'Google APIs' displayed under the installed SDK in the SDK manager. This is used by some Rhodes libraries in the kitchensink project.


Note: If it fails with a message requesting you to run 'set-rhodes-sdk' then do so in the project directory in the terminal and try running again. The application takes between 2 to 5 minutes to launch on an android simulator.
Using the iPhone simulator
All Done!
This concludes a walkthrough of how to set up Rhodes and RhoStudio on Mac OS X Lion.We can now proceed to creating Rhodes apps for both Android and iOS platform with (hopefully) less effort than writing apps in separate native environments.