Ruby Shoes Roundup: Ruby-Processing with JRuby, The Shoebox, GitHub

Posted by Mirko Stocker on May 01, 2008

Sections

Development

Topics

Ruby ,

Rich Client / Desktop ,

JRuby

Tags

Frameworks ,

GUI ,

JRuby

The Shoebox is a repository for Shoes applications, Why The Lucky Stiff's tiny toolkit for creating graphical applications. You can find an introductory article about the Ruby GUI toolkit Shoes here on InfoQ. Also, the book "Nobody knows Shoes" is now available for free.

Applications can be added to the Shoebox via its web interface, which also supports multiple versions, so modifying and republishing an application is made as simple as possible. Until recently, the Shoebox contained only Shoes applications, but now it has also become the home of Ruby-Processing, a JRuby wrapper for the Processing environment:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.

Ruby-Processing attempts to make Processing more Shoes-like, replacing Processing's Java syntax with Ruby. Let's take a look at an example: the following code suffices for a minimal application that displays a sphere that follows the cursor when it moves over the screen:

require 'ruby-processing'

class FollowCursor < Processing::App
  def setup
    # 4 lines of setup code omitted for brevity
  end

  def draw
    background 1
    translate( mouse_x, mouse_y )
    sphere 20   
  end 
end  

FollowCursor.new(:width => 200, :height => 200, :title => "Follow The Cursor!") 

Some more extensive examples can be found in the Ruby-Processing download and of course on the Shoebox. The Shoes repository is now also hosted on GitHub.

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