From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-05-08T08:55:08+09:00
Subject: Differences between Iowa and Borges; was Re: What is Borges?

On Sat, 8 May 2004 05:56:09 +0900, Dick Davies wrote

> > Iowa doesn't use continuations.
> 
> Sorry, it's so closely tied up in my head with Borges I assumed it 
> was a similarly implemented framework.

I thought I'd run down a quick list of Iowa/Borges differences.

* Iowa operates on a traditional request/response paradigm and represents 
everything as an object, using objects to track state; Borges uses 
continuations to maintain the user's path through the application.

* Seaside (and thus, Borges, too) has some fancy neat stuff in it that I 
would like to implement in Iowa, like the notion of isolating a section of 
the application so that when the user exits that section, the past pages are 
expired.  Seaside/Borges definitely has some advanced features that Iowa 
does not have.

* Borges is targetted very specifically at web applications.  Iowa was also 
targetted specifically at web applications, but I have built a layer that 
allows one to map URLs to specific components to handle them, allowing Iowa 
to be used as a general engine for dynamic web content and allowing more 
flexibility about how entry points into an application are mapped to URLs.

* Borges and Iowa both run as discrete backend processes from the webserver.

* Iowa uses a template type architecture using plain HTML. Borges generates 
the HTML programatically using an API to describe the content and a renderer 
to take that description and turn it into appropriate content (which means 
that the same Borges application could, in theory, generate HTML or run from 
command line or generate a Fox GUI).

* Iowa has full access to the HTTP headers that are received and that are to 
be sent back to the browser, making it easy to use cookies, set content 
types, and that sort of thing, where needed.  I don't know about 
Borges/Seaside on this one?

* They are both pretty neat, even though they really have more differences 
than similarities.  Borges definitely pushes the innovation envelope more 
than Iowa does.  Iowa is more conventional.


There are a lot of other things that are different about them, despite a few 
superficial similarities, but that should paint a good general picture, I 
think.


Kirk Haines