Clearing Up The Whole Shoes And RubyGems Deal

So, I have a matter of Shoes business. Everybody always asks about how to get SQLite working with Shoes. Or, uh, what’s the other one: ImageMagick? No, that can’t be it. Well, krikey, I can’t remember.

At any rate, here’s my reason for stalling.

This is Shoes. Which isn’t a Ruby library. It’s not a gem. It’s a kit. Shoes has an installer. You click on a .shy file (such as Tetris) and it launches Shoes.

And Shoes does the pulling down of gems and libraries. Take this small and very contrived Shoes script:

Shoes.setup do
  gem 'json >= 1.1.1'
  gem 'activerecord'
end

require 'json'
require 'activerecord'

Shoes.app do
  @msg = para "ALL SYSTEMS GO"
  animate(20) { @msg.toggle }
end

By putting your gem list in the Shoes.setup block, you’ll end up encountering the Shoes popup seen above if any of the gems happens to be absent. Gems are installed in ~/.shoes, to avoid needing superuser rights. (And just to keep Shoes away from messing with your normal Ruby stuff.) Leopard has some compiling problems, but other platforms are doing good. That setup window needs a cancel button.

And that’s all. I hope you have learned something. I know I did. Because I realized the thing about the cancel button.

Yes, well, and for Ruby scripts that aren’t in a gem: no sweat. Just drop those in the same directory as your Shoes script and require them. That was probably obvious, but it still feels good to get that off my chest.

Oh, also: the SQLite lib comes with Shoes since about a week ago. See, sometimes I need these gems, too.