Shoes Implementations

Color	First Commit	Backend	Number of commits	Remarks
(Red) Shoes	Jul 29 2007	Gtk / Cocoa / Win32	1824	Original version by _why
Green Shoes	Sep 12 2010	Gtk2	373
Blue Shoes	Oct 4 2010	Qt	23
Brown Shoes	Okt 5 2010	SWT / Swing	1816	Adaptation of Red Shoes
Orange Shoes	Jan 4 2011	HTML/Javascript	12
Purple Shoes	Jan 19 2012	SWT	169
Shoes 4	May 24 2012	SWT (more to come)	623	Pluggable GUI backends

There is a series of blog posts about the Rainbow of Shoes over on the Shoes blog.

The last release of the original Shoes, now known as Red Shoes was 3.0. Development on Red Shoes is made difficult however by the fact that it implements three backends (for Win/Mac/*nix) with a lot of obscure C code. Red Shoes is still the most complete implementation, and the reference for the rest, but it is no longer actively developed.

There has been a lot of experimentation to reimplement the Shoes DSL in a more cross-platform way. The focus now is to develop Shoes4 with a pluggable back end system. By having shared front-end (DSL) code, there should be less duplication between projects, and a more stable DSL across backends. The first backend to be implemented is SWT on JRuby, which is cross platform by nature. There is also a Qt backend in the works.

Of the other implementations Green Shoes is the most complete.

If you want to play with, and compare several of these, have a look at Choes. An easy way of switching between the different versions.