"Shoes is a monkey on LSD"

Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger write about some Rubyware from why the lucky stiff, et al....

If Merb is a paragon of professionalism and class, Shoes is a monkey on LSD. Shoes, by why the lucky stiff, is an incredibly compact cross-platform GUI toolkit for Ruby, but it looks nothing like the other cross-platform toolkits out there. For one thing, it is lightweight. Shoes lets you build GUIs in Ruby whose code actually looks like Ruby, not XML or Java. Shoes is under heavy development right now, but it will eventually form the basis for the new Hackety Hack, _why's programming environment for kids.

So, what are a web framework and a GUI framework doing together, you might ask? We are going to build a pastebin as a repository for our own code snippets and pieces of text we want to save. We'll build a GUI frontend using Shoes, and connect it to a Merb backend that will handle the database...

I love that by page three of why's Shoes book, the crab is toasting us on our adventure with a glass of champagne. I hope I am not giving anything away with that.