Shoes (GUI toolkit)

Shoes

Developer(s)	why the lucky stiff
Initial release	July 30, 2007
Stable release	2 (Raisins) / 2008-12-5
Written in	Ruby and C
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Development status	Active
License	MIT / Open Source
Website	shoes.heroku.com

Shoes is a simplified experimental GUI toolkit based on the Ruby Programming Language, developed by why the lucky stiff and others. Its simplicity allows easy access to programming for those with few skills or little experience in programming, thus it is ideal for education. Shoes runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (GTK+), using the underlying technologies of Cairo and Pango.

The syntax utilises the basic ideas of stacks and flows, which in Shoes correspond (roughly speaking) to windows and their contents.

The ease of construction is shown by these few lines of code, which construct a window and a button which changes the displayed message:

Shoes.app {
  @push = button "Push me"
  @note = para "Nothing pushed so far"

  @push.click {
    @note.replace "Aha! Click!"
  }
}

Uses

At this stage the toolkit is intended mainly for beginners and amateur programmers, to promote easy learning and to make that learning enjoyable, rather than for serious development in production environments [1].

References

• Shoes homepage