K
Kirk Haines
A new version of the Iowa web application framework has been released. This
release shows a major jump in version numbers. Iowa has been in use for
over two years in many successful production applications and web sites, and
with the feature additions in this release, is very close to what I want for
a 1.0 release.
It can be downloaded from
http://rubyforge.org/projects/iowa
and documentation can be found at
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa
What is Iowa?
In short, it is a web application framework that features a seperation of
code from layout and that is very simple to use to create both full featured
web based applications as well as dynamically generated web page content.
Iowa applications run as discrete backend processes, seperate from the web
server processes. The name stands for Internet Object for Web
Applications. All components are objects, and session handling is done on
the server side, leaving the developer free to concentrate on the details of
the application.
The most tested mode of operation is from an Apache web server using
mod_ruby to run a custom mod_iowa.rb handler that handles communications
between Apache and the Iowa application. It can be used via a standard CGI
interface, making it usable on any web browser that supports this. There is
also FCGI support.
New in this release is WEBrick support. Using WEBrick, it is extremely easy
to make an Iowa powered application or even an entire web site available.
The WEBrick support, though new, seems quite stable and performs
surprisingly well. There is an example that one can run in the
examples/webrick directory of the 0.9 release. One should be able to:
cd examples/webrick/iowa
ruby iowa_webrick.rb
to start it. Then just point your web browser at http://localhost:2000 to
check it out. Thanks to David Naseby for giving me the seed of code that
got me started in implementing this.
As of this release, Iowa also now runs on Windows, and it supports
multipart/form-data forms (file uploads).
Documentation is available at
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa
Specific documentation on the webrick support and on some of the new
features is forthcoming.
For those of you who are comparing, Iowa solves many of the same problems
that Rails does, but with a very different architecture. It can be used
with both ActiveRecord to handle model data or with the Kansas library
(found on Rubyforge, and with a new release coming today, as well).
Check it out! Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always eager to
help out however I can. You can email me directly, IM me at
(e-mail address removed), or subscribe to the iowa mailing list at Rubyforge.
Thanks,
Kirk Haines
release shows a major jump in version numbers. Iowa has been in use for
over two years in many successful production applications and web sites, and
with the feature additions in this release, is very close to what I want for
a 1.0 release.
It can be downloaded from
http://rubyforge.org/projects/iowa
and documentation can be found at
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa
What is Iowa?
In short, it is a web application framework that features a seperation of
code from layout and that is very simple to use to create both full featured
web based applications as well as dynamically generated web page content.
Iowa applications run as discrete backend processes, seperate from the web
server processes. The name stands for Internet Object for Web
Applications. All components are objects, and session handling is done on
the server side, leaving the developer free to concentrate on the details of
the application.
The most tested mode of operation is from an Apache web server using
mod_ruby to run a custom mod_iowa.rb handler that handles communications
between Apache and the Iowa application. It can be used via a standard CGI
interface, making it usable on any web browser that supports this. There is
also FCGI support.
New in this release is WEBrick support. Using WEBrick, it is extremely easy
to make an Iowa powered application or even an entire web site available.
The WEBrick support, though new, seems quite stable and performs
surprisingly well. There is an example that one can run in the
examples/webrick directory of the 0.9 release. One should be able to:
cd examples/webrick/iowa
ruby iowa_webrick.rb
to start it. Then just point your web browser at http://localhost:2000 to
check it out. Thanks to David Naseby for giving me the seed of code that
got me started in implementing this.
As of this release, Iowa also now runs on Windows, and it supports
multipart/form-data forms (file uploads).
Documentation is available at
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa
Specific documentation on the webrick support and on some of the new
features is forthcoming.
For those of you who are comparing, Iowa solves many of the same problems
that Rails does, but with a very different architecture. It can be used
with both ActiveRecord to handle model data or with the Kansas library
(found on Rubyforge, and with a new release coming today, as well).
Check it out! Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always eager to
help out however I can. You can email me directly, IM me at
(e-mail address removed), or subscribe to the iowa mailing list at Rubyforge.
Thanks,
Kirk Haines