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. 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. In fact, the basic proof of concept took the two of us about an hour to get working, and it took another hour to finish. Without further ado, we present our pastebin application, using Shoes and Merb, Shmerboes. Creating a Simple YAML-Based Web Service with Merb
CloudKit provides RESTful JSON storage with optional OpenID and OAuth support, including OAuth Discovery. Stored entities are versioned. Services manage their own storage and do not require schema updates when models change. CloudKit is Rack middleware and as such can be used on its own or alongside other Rack-based applications or middleware components such as Rails, Merb or Sinatra. The CloudKit stack provides an optional OAuth Filter with support for OAuth Core 1.0 and OAuth Discovery. Share your APIs with other web services, desktop apps, Open Social gadgets and more. + An OpenID Filter supplies authentication for browser-based clients. Both the OAuth and OpenID Filters collaborate to simultaneously provide login screens and auth challenges in a single HTTP response. + Discoverable, schema-free, auto-versioned JSON storage tracks each version of each JSON document to allow progressive diff/merge with decentralized or occasionally connected clients.