help with http post in shoes

[Vijay]

Hi,
I have a strange problem with using ruby http post in shoes block. I get a
connection refused - connect(2) error on trying to run the shoes app.
I am running the program on macOS and the problem seems to be
resolve-replace.rb: line 19.
Here's the code

require 'rubygems'
require 'erb'
require 'net/http'

Shoes.app{
   @http = Net::HTTP.new('localhost', 8080)
    path = "/remoting/ruby/Auth/logIn"

    args = {:userName => 'user', :password => '11111'}

    body = args.map {|k,v| "#{k}=#{ERB::Util.url_encode(v)}"}.join("&")

    resp, data = @http.post(path, body, @headers)

    para resp.response
    para data
}

I can run the program without Shoes block and it runs fine.  What am I doing
wrong ?

Thanks for all the help.

Regards,
Vijay

PS - I understand that shoes recommends openuri over the ruby http class but
I would really appreciate comments on this issue