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