Our Focus: Shoes in C#.NET

Creating QR Code ISO/IEC18004 in C#.NET Our Focus: Shoes

As mentioned in the previous section, the three most popular Ruby GUI development libraries (as of the writing of this book) are Shoes, Ruby-GNOME2, and wxRuby. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and we ll briefly look at those in this chapter. We re going to focus on Shoes, however. The reason for this is that Shoes is fully crossplatform, the most popular approach, very concise and easy to read, and, frankly, great fun to use! Of the popular alternatives, wxRuby is particularly verbose and arcane, and would take many tens of pages to cover in any sufficient depth, and Ruby-GNOME2 is nominally cross-platform, but can be particularly tricky to install. Shoes, on the other hand, is a single download, and you ll be ready to go in just a few lines of code! A whole book could be written about how to effectively use each of these Ruby GUI development libraries and toolkits, so we re only going to scratch the surface. After we ve covered Shoes in reasonable detail, we ll look at what each library s focus is and what the pros and cons are. Then I ll present a list of further resources and tutorials to reference. So, let s get going with what is the most popular and arguably easiest to use Ruby GUI development library: Shoes!

Shoes is a unique, Ruby-based GUI development environment. It s not a library you can use from your regular Ruby apps, but an entire Ruby interpreter with added GUI functionality. It was developed by why the lucky stiff, the talented developer and artist who drew the foreword of this book. Shoes unusualness offers some pros and cons. It might not be a typical library, but it can package applications into distributable application files for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows with a single click. It s very easy to get going, and its syntax for producing GUI apps is incredibly intuitive. The downside is that it s an entirely original creation for Rubyists only; it s not based on a common GUI development standard at all, although some of the techniques you ll learn can be applied elsewhere.

Let s get our Shoes on!

Shoes is completely separate from your usual Ruby installation, so you need to download it and install it fresh. This is very simple. Go to http://shoooes.net/, and the links you need are right there. Downloads are offered for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Download the one for your operating system and open or execute the downloaded file to get Shoes installed. Shoes installation procedure is not particularly unique, so hopefully you should find it simple to install.

As of mid-2009, you can find an installation guide at http://help.shoooes.net/Installing.html. Tip

Once Shoes is installed, create a Ruby file with your favorite text editor in the usual way. Call it shoes1.rb and save it anywhere you like. Populate it thus: Shoes.app { button "Press me" } Instead of running your code in the usual way, you need to run it with Shoes. Get Shoes up and running (for example, by double-clicking the Shoes icon in your Applications folder on Mac OS X or in the Start Menu on Windows). Then open the shoes1.rb file you created (a file selector box may come up automatically, but if it doesn t, use the Open menu option). Upon opening shoes1.rb, you should see a window a little like that in Figure 16-1 a window with just a single button inside that says Press me. Click the button if you like, but nothing will happen. Then close the application.

You ve written your first Ruby GUI app! It didn t do very much, but all journeys begin with a single step. Let s make it more complex. Go back to shoes1.rb and update it to this: Shoes.app do button("Press me") do alert Time.now end end

Note We ve switched from using the { } block format to using do and end. In existing Shoes code, this