Hi Fellow Rubyists.
I'm pleased and proud to announce (finally) the first public release of the Arrow Web Application Framework.
## General Information
Arrow is a web application framework for mod_ruby. It was designed to make
development of web applications under Apache easier and more fun without
sacrificing the power of being able to access the native Apache API.
## Why another web framework?
We chose to write this framework despite the existance of several interesting
and excellent frameworks already written in Ruby for several reasons:
* mod_ruby: No existing frameworks (that we know of) run under mod_ruby, or at
least not with the same kind of access as a first-order handler.
* Apache: Some current frameworks are very compelling but for one thing: they
run using their own webserver written in Ruby. While this is fine for some
lighter applications, our experience showed that this strategy does not
scale as well as Apache, nor does it allow the application developer to
leverage all of the other functionality already built in to Apache or
available as modules.
* Advanced features: While there are some current frameworks that provide some
of the features we desired for application development, there were none that
supported them all.
* Extensibility/customizability: Many of the current frameworks make it
difficult to override or extend their built-in features. We wanted something
that would allow us to adapt to any situation.
## Design Goals
Our primary intent when creating Arrow was to make development of applications
under mod_ruby easier without sacrificing power. To that end, we started with
four major goals:
1. Apache API: The developer should still have access to most or all of the
Apache API, but without being required to know or care about most of it if
she does not want to.
2. Persistant resources: Applications should be able to take advantage of
persistant resources like cached database handles, connection pools, etc.
3. No fork overhead: Like with native mod_ruby handlers or registry CGIs, the
overhead of the fork and compile phase should be minimized.
4. Automatic reload: Maintain the immediacy of CGI with auto-reloaded
applications, configuration, and templates to avoid the server-restart cycle
that is required with every change in programming with mod_ruby handlers.
## Features
We also wanted to add some features which are useful in most all web application
programming:
* Templating: To separate presentation HTML from application logic, we decided
to provide an integrated templating system that uses valid XHTML documents (or
document fragments) for templates. We also realized that there are already
many excellent templating systems available for Ruby, and so we tried to make
it as easy as possible to use your own preferred templating library instead of
ours if you should so choose.
* Sessions: Many web application developers find it necessary to maintain state
between connections in their applications, so Arrow includes sessions that are
very easy to use, but can be configured to use one of a number of different
configurable strategies on the back end for storage, locking, and key
generation.
* Argument validation/untainting: Web applications need to handle input from end
users which needs to be untainted and validated against a definition of what
constitutes legal data. Fortunately, Travis Whitton already wrote an excellent
Ruby data-validation library called FormValidator, which is built into Arrow.
* Modular applications: Very often, web applications need to share several
subsystems (e.g., authentication/authorization, state checkpointing and
validation, etc.) which are orthogonal to the main application logic but still
necessary. Arrow allows some apps to act as delegators, providing some
functionality for all apps which are chained through it.
* Graceful error-handling: Sometimes applications fall on their face, and there
is little more frustrating than having to track down an error trace from
within the bowels of your app. Arrow provides a customizable error-handling
mechanism that can be used to speed development and act on errors
intelligently.
* Strong introspection: One of Ruby's strengths is its strong introspection
features, and we wanted to build on those strengths. Arrow has some powerful
introspection facilities that let the developer examine the state of
applications, templates, sessions, etc.
## Current Status
This is a beta release. Things will probably break, but the APIs are fairly
fixed and it's feature-complete for the 1.0.0 release. If you do find something
broken, please let us know.
## Contact
Project Page:
http://www.rubycrafters.com/projects/Arrow/
Tracker:
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?group_id=231
Download:
http://www.RubyCrafters.com/projects/Arrow/Arrow-0.1.0.tar.gz
Manual/Tutorial (under construction):
http://www.RubyCrafters.com/arrow-manual/
Thanks for your time.
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--
Michael Granger <ged@FaerieMUD.org>
Rubymage, Architect, Believer
The FaerieMUD Consortium <http://www.FaerieMUD.org/>