IOWA Update

Avi Bryant said:

> The design of IOWA was indeed heavily inspired by WebObjects; it's
> also a dead project, and it doesn't at all surprise me that it doesn't
> work with recent versions of Ruby.

I vanished off of the list about a year ago as a result of not having time
to keep up with the traffic and keep the family fed.  I'm back actively
reading, though, and have been skimming through some archived posts for
interesting things.  I came across this, and thought I'd send out a quick
update.

IOWA is not really a dead project.  I picked it up for a production
application about a year and a half ago, and found it, while rough, a
package with a lot of potential.  In the last year and a half I have
commented it, documented it, refined it, and expanded it quite a bit while
at the same time using it on pieces ranging from single dynamic report
pages to custom software apps to an entire dynamic site engine for sites
with significant dynamic content.  I've got about a dozen discrete sites
using it at some level.

I've added the ability to receive a faux Apache::Request object into the
Iowa app that gives access to most everything Apache::Request does,
including the ability to alter the HTTP headers that go out to the client,
which lets one use cookies, have access to Query_String parameters, and
other useful things.  I've created a system to use IOWA to map specific
URLs to IOWA, which makes it useful and practical to use IOWA for websites
with dynamic content, but which are not necessarily full fledged web
applications themselves.  i.e. pages that deliver reports, or pages that
need to be bookmarkable, or even sites that map discrete content elements
to the same URLs, delivering one or another based on a login cookie (I
have a large, complete production site, running hundreds of thousands of
hits per day, that does this) or language preference or other criteria.

So, IOWA isn't really dead.  It's very much alive.  It's just that I've
also been keeping it pretty quiet as I used it and worked on it.  Unless
Avi has any objections (and I haven't asked, yet), I'm working on setting
up a new website for IOWA that contains better documentation, live
examples, and a current, updated installation package.


Kirk Haines