Why Shoes? at The Ruby User Group

Presentation at chirb tonight. Huge audience! (Over 50 people braved the rain.) Ryan Platte gave an eye opening talk on using GWT with Rails, and Mike Ward talked up a very cool Rails Gem/Plugin called Argible. It took me a few minutes to understand what Argible was about, but once I saw how it was using annotations to get rid of that business of accessing the parameter map in rails I was impressed.

My talk on Shoes was rough going: I put off the research, no documentation for it yet, and half the audience couldn't get the code to compile. Everyone made the best of it. (Thank you everyone!) I gave them a good taste of what a fun little toolkit Shoes is, and some interesting discussion resulted. A question that came up over and over was "Why Shoes?" The following were the major benefits as promulgated by myself, Andy, and Evan

• You work purely in Ruby, so there aren't other languages or technologies to learn.
  
• Your application can be nice, neat OO code.
• Simple syntax, small files.
• Apps are easy to distribute since shoes is entirely self contained.
• Apps are easy to distribute because of the .shy files.

We talked several times about the point of shoes, and if you consider that the intended application is in Hackety-Hack. The above benefits are trememdous. But Why brings up the following in the Shoes README

Shoes is strictly inspired by stuff like REBOL/View, HyperCard,
the web itself and, of course, Processing and NodeBox.

I don't like the bulkiness and the layers and layers of wxWindows,
FOX, QT, GNOME. They are big, big libraries and all the apps look
identical, devoid of spirit.

The unique thing about the web is that it gives you very few
controls, but people are able to build wildly different pages
with it that are still immediately accessible to people.

My final position on Shoes is that I'm all in, and I can't wait for it to pump life back into HacketyHack.