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Welcome to the shoes4 wiki! This is a great place to get started with shoes4.
shoes4 is the new version of the shoes DSL (Domain Specific Language) for writing GUI applications in ruby. shoes4 is rethinking the way shoes works, from an implementation point of view. The DSL itself however should stay intact as shooooesers all over the planet love it as it is. The shoes DSL is pretty simple which is the main reason for its beauty. Also cross-platform compatibility is at the heart of goals for shoes. For further information you can check out the homepage, an awesome talk by Steve Klabnik called the return of shoes and a talk by Tobias Pfeiffer called An Introduction to Shoes. Also don't forget to have a look at the most famous shoes application Hackety Hack.
The goals of shoes4 are
- to be almost-fully-compatible with Shoes 3
- to make changes to the Shoes DSL in those few cases where it isn't already as wonderful as it could be
- to separate the DSL from the graphical implementation, so that multiple implementations can "plug in" to the same DSL
- to establish a "shoes spec" suite of specifications. Any implementation should be able to run the spec suite to verify that
it_behaves_like :shoes. The spec suite also makes hacking on shoes4 easier, because it tells you if your changes have broken anything else. - to run in a normal Ruby environment, rather than embedding its own customized Ruby
The reference implementation for shoes4 is SWT(Standard Widget Toolkit), which runs on JRuby. However, we want there to be multiple backends for shoes -- maybe Qt, maybe GTK -- you name it! There have been different flavors of shoes before, but shoes4 aims to establish a shared DSL and a shared spec suite, so that the implementations can be more or less interchangeable.
You should check out the README for up to date information about how to install Shoes4 on your machine and what dependencies are needed.
You want to help out with the development of shoes4? Great! You can start off by having a look at this tutorial on davorb's blog.
You can always check out our open issues and see if you can contribute either by implementing something, discussing something or testing something. Everything helps and every help is highly appreciated!
If you don't find anything there you can also work on something else. You can check out the manual and see if the described functionality is implemented and if not go ahead and implement it.
Also you may check out the samples/ directory - it contains a lot of samples which you can try to run and if they don't work you can go ahead and try to fix some of them. There is a README in the samples folder detailing which samples are currently considered to be working.
The general directory structure of shoes4 is as follows:
- bin: contains all the different executables we use - most prominently swt-shoooes
- fonts: surprisingly, some fonts we use
- images: images we use, another surprise!
- lib this is were the real implementation resides. All implementation work should go here. It contains the shoes directory. The shoes directory contains only the DSL implementation of shoes4 - which means that no backend specifics should be used at this level (for example, no java and no swt should be used). The real backend implementation lives in the swt sub-folder.
- samples: a variety of samples that should show that a given shoes implementation works as intended. When they all work, we'll be very happy!
- spec: shoes4 is written with Test Driven Development (TDD), which means we want to have tests for everything, and these tests (also called specs) go into this directory! The ones for the DSL and common implementation go into the shoes directory while the tests for our current backend swt go into the swt_shoes directory.
- static: contains static images and text files mainly for the manual.
- testing: a couple of random scripts for testing purposes
Shoes 4 has a comfortably-fitting style guide. While it is not laced too tightly, it might help you get your footing.
If you work on something, please let us know! Make a comment on an issue you are currently working or if you are working on a new implementation please open an appropriate issue so we have a place for discussion and people don't end up implementing the same thing twice!
Don't be afraid to make an early pull request with an incomplete implementation! This is great for discussions, receiving feedback and helping each other.
This section is meant to help you with some resources regarding some of the main technologies used in the development of shoes4.
Currently we are using JRuby for the development of shoes4 as it is cross-platform compatible and gives us access to a large ecosystem of cross-platform compatible GUI frameworks. You can find more information about JRuby at the project homepage.
As we call a lot of Java methods this guide about calling Java from Ruby is really helpful! JRuby makes the integration with java really seamless, so you can call java methods as if they were Ruby methods - yay! :-)
RSpec is the testing framework of our choice, you can check out their documentation. RSpec is really descriptive so you could also go ahead and check out specs/ directory in order to get a feel for RSpec.