From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-05-18T15:32:36+09:00
Subject: Iowa 0.20 FINALLY released

Finally.  I am announcing, with much nervousness (I'm sure that I forgot 
something, or broke something), the release of Iowa 0.20.  The release 
itself is available at

http://rubyforge.org/projects/iowa

and the first draft of a tutorial that is nearing completion, as well as a 
basic reference document (actually, I'll be uploading it later today, after 
I sleep), are available at

http://enigo.com/projects/iowa

This release is based on code that I have been running on a bunch of 
different production web sites and a multitude of different applications 
over the last coupe of years.  It has a few new features, but hopefully I 
didn't introduce any new bugs.  :)  Typically I have very, very few problems 
unless I manage to miss a bug in newly introduced code; normally everything 
just works.  Oh, and it should run with equal ease on both 1.6.8 and 1.8.x 
versions of Ruby.  If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to ask.


Iowa v. 0.20
----

Iowa is a framework for developing web based applications as well as for 
facilitating the development of non-application dynamic web pages.  It 
features seperation of content from code, content that is written in regular 
HTML, and code that is written in regular Ruby.  It handles the issues of 
tracking sessions and maintaining state on the server side, while leaving 
the developer with the freedom to use cookies or query string parameters or 
anything else the developer wants, if needed.

IOWA is an acronym, Internet Object for Web Applications.  Iowa views 
everything in terms of objects, from the application to the user sessions to 
the components that make up a web page or an application.  It supports code 
reuse because each piece of content is a component which can be inserted 
into the content of another component.

Iowa applications run as persistent, standalone processes that need not be 
on the same server as the webserver software.  Any web server that supports 
the CGI protocol can use Iowa, though there is specific support for an 
Apache mod_ruby handler and for using FastCGI in order to get better 
performance.

Refer to http://enigo.com/projects/iowa for more complete information as 
well as some demo programs.  More demos are in progress.  I'm also looking 
at implementing a demo of the Java PetStore.


Thanks,

Kirk Haines