Occasionally, but not often, I take a look through interesting github repositories and see if there any cool projects I should know about. I found three20 this way. A few days ago I found the Wax iPhone Framework. For the record, when I first started learning Objective-C to make iPhone apps I looked into a Ruby/Objective-C bridge to see if I could just write all the logic in Ruby vs. C. And I even posted this on stackoverflow. Because, well I just didn't understand why we had to use a langauge like C when there are other languages out there. Wax gets me. Wax understands I want to write cool iPhone Apps but with garbage collection, less code, no header files, no static types, closures, and all the things a cool language like Lua brings to the table.

Did you like how I just slipped "Lua" in there? Did anyone say what's Lua? Well, that's what I said when I first looked at wax. I had never heard of Lua. Apparently it's a real progrmaming language and been around since 1993!

I started by looking at the example wax projects. First thing you'll notice is xcode doesn't have the first clue what a .lua file is so you'll probably want to use a different editor. The examples were so cool. Very easy to understand how to work with Lua and get started. I began the process of converting an app of mine over to the wax system.

I kept thinking, we'll there's no way I'll be able to do this in wax. But everytime, there was a way! I was able to write to a sqlite databases, use classes like MFMailComposeViewController, and anything else my original app did in pure Objective-C. And it was such a joy to write less code and not worry about header files and memory issues. At the time of writing this post my new app with wax is still pending review in the app store, but assuming it gets approved I give wax 5 stars.