This project provides a basic MVC framework on top of the Shoes environment for those of us strange people who have done MVC so long it's extremely difficult to think about applications other ways.

NOTE: this code is highly experimental and an early work in progress. It wouldn't be wise to rely on it right now for anything other than experiments, prototypes and proofs of concept.

While this code could well be the basis for something more sophisticated with Shoes, I'm now mostly concentrating on a more generic MVC library for cross-platform Ruby applications that doesn't depend on Shoes: https://github.com/atownley/ruby_mvc

The main reasons for this is that I need more sophisticated GUI control interactions for the types of applications I want to build than are possible with what's currently in Shoes. I still think Shoes is great for a lot of things, but for the immediate needs I have for 2011/2012, Ruby MVC is more appropriate.

If you're interested in expanding on what's here, just fork and send pull requests.

The normal way to ensure this gem is installed is to add it to the Shoes.setup block, e.g.

Shoes.setup do
	gem 'shoes_mvc'
end

As of version 0.0.0, it's available as a gem from rubygems.org, so this should just work. If you're using the Rails integration, you'll also need to have a version of ActiveRecord installed.

If you're building it manually (because you're hacking on it), then you'll need to install it yourself in the local Shoes gem directory for your user. On MacOS X, you can do it like this:

$ gem build shoes_mvc.gemspec
$ gem install --install-dir $HOME/.shoes/+gem ./*.gem

The following issues are related to getting this gem actually installed and working as expected:

• http://librelist.com/browser/shoes/2011/11/18/a-tangled-web-mess-of-dependencies-encoding-vs-sqlite3-vs-activerecord/
• shoes/shoes-deprecated#163
• shoes/shoes-deprecated#164

With Policeman, the Encoding class doesn't seem to actually be defined completely. As a result, anything to do with Encoding and ActiveRecord chokes fairly hard. The "solution" is to hack the encoding.rb file in activesupport so that it defines #encoding_aware? as false. Neat, huh?

Hopefully, this will all get fixed with the next release of Shoes. :(