From: ntalbott@...
Date: 2002-01-31T07:31:02+09:00
Subject: RE: IOWA error and question

Avi Bryant [mailto:avi@beta4.com] wrote:

> <ntalbott@rolemodelsoft.com> wrote in message 
> news:<000001c1a9a3$e4d1c280$f601a8c0@abraham>...
> > First of all, when I try to access IOWA pages (I've tried all the 
> > included examples), I'm getting an exception that I don't see 
> > addressed in the mail archives. It looks like this:
> 
> I've never seen that before (and can't replicate it) - the 
> error is the error given when you use a tag it doesn't 
> recognize, but it should certainly recognize <ul>.  If you 
> print out the exception caught in the rescue clause of 
> Element.newElement that should give a little more info.

I researched that far, and indeed, it is not finding the tag it is
looking for in the hash of element types. I cannot, however, figure out
why. The only thing I can determine is it might either be using the
wrong tag name, or it might have the wrong keys for the types in the
hash. For instance, it appears that the key in the hash is "iowa::ul",
while the key it is looking for is "ul". I did not dig far enough (and
it seemed like I would have to dig quite a bit) to figure out which (if
either) of those is correct, and what the cause is.


> Is the parse error always given for the first dynamic tag in 
> the file (ie the first with an oid attribute), for all the examples?

I can't tell exactly where it's dying, but here's the output for three
of the examples:

	guestbook - unknown Element type: String: parse error around
@guest.first
	calc - unknown Element type: ul: parse error around <ul
oid="stackList">
	subdemo - unknown Element type: form: parse error around <form
oid="reload">

Any ideas?



> > My second question is more general: what's the state of IOWA? Will
we 
> > see a more polished/stable release before too long? Or has
development 
> > been dropped?
> 
> I wrote something about this a while back.

Yah, I seem to remember that now. Sorry for not searching.


> The good news is, 
> there will be a new release of IOWA quite soon.  The bad news 
> is, it won't be in Ruby (ducks and runs).  I've been working 
> in Squeak smalltalk for the last little while and put my 
> effort into a port of IOWA to that platform.

It's good to hear that development is ongoing, and it seems like porting
from Squeak won't be extremely hard. I am curious, however, as to why
you decided to switch to Squeak. Was it just a change in interest, or
were there things you could do with it that Ruby wouldn't support?


> However, 
> Michael Neumann expressed some interest in taking my Squeak 
> work and porting it back to Ruby (a lot of polishing went 
> into the port).  I don't know how much, if any, of this he 
> has done.  I am *very* interested in seeing this happen, so 
> if anyone's interested in helping Michael I'm sure he could 
> use it, but I don't have the cycles to do it myself.

I'm glad someone at least has it on their to-do list, as I definitely
can't add it to mine right now. Perhaps at some point in the future,
though...

Thanks,


Nathaniel

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