From: "Brad Cox, Ph.D." <bcox@...>
Date: 2002-06-01T09:51:47+09:00
Subject: Re: mod_ruby documentation/tutorial...

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Sean Chittenden wrote:

Sean, I'm an long-term user of mod_perl and tomcat/jetty and a recent convert
to ruby. I haven't considered eruby or mod_ruby, partially because of lack of
documentation, but more so because my experience with perl and java made me 
seek an entirely different approach that orients to the end user's view of 
the problem instead of uncritically falling in line with the jakarta MVC jihad.

I've just uploaded an early pilot release to http://virtualschool.edu:8083 and
would be really interested in your reactions to the approach described there.
The biggest departure is the top-down approach summarized below, as distinct
from the bottom-up approach of competing approaches. Don't be fooled by the 
emphasis on teching; ILE does exactly what other web application environments 
do but (I believe) but packaged to be used by mortals.

Or so I think anyway. Its to check this and other assumptions that I'm hoping
for your feedback/reactions.

PS: The download link won't work quite yet; just browse the online dox.  
Hopefully tomorrow. Its based on Steven Stansfield's Ocelot servlet engine
which is bundled with the ILE distribution.

Here's the basic blurb:

ILE is an lightweight and powerful environment for building interactive
learning environments.  It is useful for building any web application
with interactive, persistent form-based features. But its main audience
is teachers who think that hauling the education to where the students
work and live is often better than the other way around.

Comparable environments just provide a bare foundation to build on from
first principles.  ILE is a finished environment to live in and learn
from while you remodel it to taste.  While the former requires unlimited
expertise, the latter requires only that you learn skills when you need
them from the built-in tutorial.

The installation instructions provides everything you need; the web
server, the servlet engine, the programming language, and ILE itself,
all wrapped up in a tutorial that shows how to remodel the system
into exactly what you need.

> It's not complete yet, but there's a mod_ruby tutorial that's
> reasonably well finished that I would like to solicit feedback from.
> 
> http://sean.chittenden.org/programming/ruby/mod_ruby/apachecon-2002/
> 
> intro_to_mod_ruby.[dvi,pdf,ps,txt]
> 
> The PDF will look chunky under Windows until you print it out, sorry.
> I'll dig up the font hack to fix that sometime this weekend.
> 
> As for the mod_ruby_*.txt documents, those are some topics that I'll
> be writing about in the future and will hopefully be speaking about at
> ApacheCon.  Please, visit ApacheCon.com and let them know that you're
> interested in hearing about mod_ruby.
> 
> If anyone has any questions, corrections, suggestions, feedback and/or
> sharp criticism are more than welcome!!! :~)  -sc
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> PS For the legal folks out there, these were written from scratch and
> are based on nothing but the source code and prior experiences.  :~)
> 
> 

-- 
Brad J Cox, Ph.D. bcox@virtualschool.edu, 703 361 4751
For industrial age goods there were checks and credit cards
For everything else, there is http://virtualschool.edu/mybank
Java Web Application Environment: http://virtualschool.edu/jwaa
Interactive Learning Environment: http://virtualschool.edu:8083