What Is Iowa?
Iowa is a framework, written in the Ruby programming language, for the development of both web based applications and more general dynamic web content.
Iowa is:
- Interpreted:
All Iowa code is written in Ruby. Iowa takes advantages of Ruby's highly dynamic nature to automatically reload and reevaluate content or code changes on the fly. - Objects:
All web content in Iowa is built entirely from reusable, encapsulated web components (objects). - for Web Applications:
Iowa was originally designed with applications in mind. Seperation of code and content means the developer doesn't have to worry about the mechanics of HTML generation while server side session containment means the developer can concentrate on the issues of writing applications without worrying about things like hidden form fields, cookies, or query strings (though if the need is there, the developer can make use of cookies, query string data, and control over the HTTP headers to be sent). At the same time, all of the things that make Iowa great for application development also make it a very nice tool for developing dynamic web pages which are not application oriented.
Iowa vastly facilitates the rapid development of maintainable and highly capable web applications and general dynamic web content. It features seperation of code from content along with the ability to write content in regular HTML. There are a few special tags and one attribute that is applied to tags which generate dynamic results. The learning curve to begin using Iowa markup is very low.
The current generation of Iowa can operate on any web server that supports the CGI protocol and should work on any OS that supports Ruby. One can run it integrated with WEBrick for an all-in-one solution that can serve Iowa generated content, static content, and CGI generated content. It's reasonably fast, too! For better performance there is a mod_ruby handler that can be used to interact with the Iowa application (Iowa applications run as a seperate process from the web server[s], and can even be ran on different machines from the web server[s]). Iowa can also now be used with FastCGI, though this support is still new and not heavily tested.
Last Modified: $Date: 2004/10/19 19:03:27 $
