Contents

012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901
IOWA is a web development framework for Ruby.

IOWA started life around more than 5 years ago as an experiment by Avi
Bryant.  He was exploring many of the ideas that he would later revisit
when he wrote the Smalltalk web development framework, Seaside.

Around 5 years ago I was just beginning to learn Ruby.  I loved what I
saw with the language, coming from Perl, so I was starting to look for
a reason to actually do something with the language.

Soon after, I was given a contract job to develop a web site for the
Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce -- a variation on a job search web site
aimed at companies and college students looking for interns and
internships.  I wanted to use Ruby for the job, so I started looking
around at what was available for that task.  Coming from Perl, where
there were multiple frameworks, and where I had implemented my own
framework at a previous company, the state of the art for Ruby was
pretty barren.  There was CGI.rb, but that road didn't thrill me.  There
was Cerise, but it didn't capture my imagination, either.

Then I came across Avi's little experiment, IOWA.  It was a breath of
fresh air.  Clean, simple, and powerful.  I immediately saw potential
in it.  It was unusable, though.  IOWA 0.14 just didn't have the
necessary feature set or deployment infrastructure to really be usable
for a production site.  I was hooked, though, so I started hacking.

The job site came together pretty well -- better than I had ever
experienced with a Perl solution, and it served to convince me of the
merit of the IOWA approach.  I haven't looked back since, and in total
have developed somewhere around 100 different dynamic web sites and web
applications with it, developing on it as necessary in order to support
my real-world needs.

Version data entries

3 entries across 3 versions & 1 rubygems

Version	Path
IOWA-1.0.3	doc/History.txt
IOWA-1.0.2	doc/History.txt
IOWA-1.0.0	doc/History.txt