From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2004-05-08T00:54:59-07:00
Subject: Re: Differences between Iowa and Borges; was Re: What is Borges?

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Kirk Haines (khaines@enigo.com) wrote:

> On Sat, 8 May 2004 05:56:09 +0900, Dick Davies wrote
>=20
> > > Iowa doesn't use continuations.
> >=20
> > Sorry, it's so closely tied up in my head with Borges I assumed it=20
> > was a similarly implemented framework.

Iowa is Borges' grandparent.

> I thought I'd run down a quick list of Iowa/Borges differences.
>=20
> * 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.
>=20
> * 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 can use specialized handlers for particular types of content, for
example, CSS is generated from the CSS definitions for all the visible
components.  These do not have "pretty" URLs, but handlers for just
about anything could be easily created.  One of the posters to the
borges-users list is using a handler to generate SVG on the fly.

> * Borges and Iowa both run as discrete backend processes from the
> webserver.
>=20
> * 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).

As Julian also said, a template system could be plugged into Borges very
easily.

> * 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?

The response headers can be set fairly easily, request headers are
semi-available.

> * 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.

So far, Borges is on par with Seaside 2.3 for the purposes of evaluating
innovation.

> 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.

--=20
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://segment7.net
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