Shoes (GUI toolkit)

Shoes

Original author(s)	why the lucky stiff
Developer(s)	Team Shoes
Initial release	July 30, 2007 (2007-07-30)
Stable release	3 (Policeman) / August 19, 2010 (2010-08-19)
Development status	Active
Written in	Ruby and C, some Objective-C
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	English
License	MIT / Open Source
Website	shoesrb.com

Shoes is a GUI toolkit based on the Ruby programming language. It was originally developed by why the lucky stiff, and others are carrying on with it after his disappearance. Shoes runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (GTK+), using the underlying technologies of Cairo and Pango.

Shoes' philosophy is one of simplicity. It's designed to make applications as easy as possible. Here's an example Shoes app:

Shoes.app :title => "Push Button" do
  @note = para "Nothing pushed so far"
 
  button "Push me" do
    @note.replace "Aha! The button was pushed!"
  end
end

Shoes isn't just for standard windowing widgets. It also has basic graphics primitives, letting developers draw lines, circles, and even physics (via Chipmunk).

Releases

• _why releases:

1. v1, "Curious"
2. v2, "Raisins"

• Post-_why releases:

1. v3, "Policeman"

Current release is version 3.1. Shoes 4 is going to be a major re-write. It'll move to an all-Ruby code base, using the Ruby bindings to the windowing libraries, rather than the C ones.

References

• Shoes homepage
• Codebase hosted on github.