Roll Call - users / developers / "Is this thing on?"

[pjfitzgibbons]

Hello Shoes-ers!

It's been a looong time. We've been busy chasing orb-structured organic virulents and such.

The question I'm asking is, to be blunt: "Is Shoes Dead?"

Do we have active users?
Do we have a mailing list (working) ?
Do we have a discussion channel (modern)? (ie. Slack)

wxWidgets 2.0 just dropped in the past couple of days.
A renewed Shoes (5.0?) could be a direction if there is some activity at all.

Is there an alternative? IF one were to stay in Ruby-land, what other desktop-GUI library would be better?
Or is desktop-GUI in Ruby just no longer relevant. (Hello, Electron, I'm referring to you.)

Thoughts, one and all?

[ccoupe]

There is a group, Scarpe that contacted me about Shoes 3 downloads. Conversation here. Since then I see the Facebook page is poked a few times a day, when I bother to look at FB. Based on their commit log, Scarpe is fairly active.

Do we have a mailing list (working) ?

No. I killed it a few years ago - no one noticed or cared enough.

[Peter9Claudius]

Hello all,

so some German guys still seem to have fun using Shoes. And I am one of them.

However, Python is currently all the rage everywhere in the big companies, and the number of Ruby users is very manageable. Even among those, people are always happily surprised that a toolkit like Shoes even exists.

Stupidly, working with Shoes is purely a private pleasure, since IT doesn't want to know anything except Python, JavaScript or C# in our case.

I, for one, fervently hope that Shoes doesn't disappear into the void.

Warm regards,

Peter.

[megatux]

Hello, as active desktop GUI library alternatives I like Glimmer DSL, it has several backends, some are more complete or multiplatform that others, maybe the one with LibUI could work for you. Or using directly the libUI bindings
Also GTK3 wrapper seems well maintained but not sure if that work outside Linux.

I'm also interested in keeping Shoes alive. I was thinking in investigate wrapping the Shoes DSL on top of Glimmer or LibUI.

[noahgibbs]

Hello! I'm one of those Scarpe guys. Seems fair to mention that our implementation is not very complete or mature yet. We have some fun activity around our Discord server and repo, but I would not put us in as usable a category as Shoes4 or Glimmer. Scarpe started as a recent Hack Days project and just sort of got out of hand :-)

[noahgibbs]

Also, @metatux - we've looked at wrapping those with Scarpe, at least briefly. You'd need an extensive wrapper over raw libui, it's designed to be carefully managed. Very crashy if you're not careful and pass a nil in the wrong place, etc. Glimmer would probably be a better choice since it does a lot of that management.

[skinnyjames]

Just throwing a couple thoughts into the mix.

I've been working on a backend agnostic cross-platform desktop application library that has similar aims to Shoes.
Current targets are Raylib and SDL2, but it'd be cool to support things like Wayland.

It's a bit different, in that it uses a templating language as opposed to a high level DSL (but there is a DSL for drawing directly to the screen).

It's still under active development and doesn't yet have things like packaging built-in, but I'd love to learn from some of the wins that the shoes community has achieved over the years.

The library is called Hokusai. The source is here: https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai
A deeper walkthrough is here: https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net/

I'm currently building a little POC here if anyone wants to see how it reads: https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/trollio_editor
Since it uses Ruby, you can also do cool things like send apps over a network and mount them dynamically.

Anywhoo, it'd be cool to team up, or at least learn some new things.