I vanished off of the list about a year ago as a result of not having time to keep up with the traffic and keep the family fed. I'm back actively reading, though, and have been skimming through some archived posts for interesting things. I came across this, and thought I'd send out a quick update.

IOWA is not really a dead project. I picked it up for a production application about a year and a half ago, and found it, while rough, a package with a lot of potential. In the last year and a half I have commented it, documented it, refined it, and expanded it quite a bit while at the same time using it on pieces ranging from single dynamic report pages to custom software apps to an entire dynamic site engine for sites with significant dynamic content. I've got about a dozen discrete sites using it at some level.

I've added the ability to receive a faux Apache::Request object into the Iowa app that gives access to most everything Apache::Request does, including the ability to alter the HTTP headers that go out to the client, which lets one use cookies, have access to Query_String parameters, and other useful things. I've created a system to use IOWA to map specific URLs to IOWA, which makes it useful and practical to use IOWA for websites with dynamic content, but which are not necessarily full fledged web applications themselves. i.e. pages that deliver reports, or pages that need to be bookmarkable, or even sites that map discrete content elements to the same URLs, delivering one or another based on a login cookie (I have a large, complete production site, running hundreds of thousands of hits per day, that does this) or language preference or other criteria.

So, IOWA isn't really dead. It's very much alive. It's just that I've also been keeping it pretty quiet as I used it and worked on it. Unless Avi has any objections (and I haven't asked, yet), I'm working on setting up a new website for IOWA that contains better documentation, live examples, and a current, updated installation package.

Kirk Haines