Arrow

Arrow is a web application framework for mod_ruby, a module for the Apache webserver that exposes most of the server’s module API to Ruby via an embedded interpreter.

It features:

all the usual web goodies:
- advanced query-argument handling
- cookie manipulation
- URL utilities
- Multipart (upload) form handling
reloadable modular application code that can be chained together to form larger applications
object-oriented templating system
pluggable cookie-based session management
form-data validation and untainting
single-file YAML-based configuration for both the appserver and applications
Hierarchical pluggable logging facilities

For more information about Arrow’s history and design, see Arrow’s History and Design Philosophy.

A Quick Example

Here’s the obligatory “Hello World” example:

   1  #!/usr/bin/ruby
   2  
   3  require 'arrow/applet'
   4  
   5  class HelloWorldApplet < Arrow::Applet
   6  
   7      default_action :hello
   8  
   9      def hello_action( txn, *args )
  10          return "<html><head><title>Hello, World</title></head>" +
  11                 "<body><h1>Hello, World</h1></body></html>"
  12      end
  13  
  14  end

A Hello World applet

The output from this will be something like:

Getting Started

Before you can get started, you have to install and configure some stuff. Nothing too tricky.

If you don’t yet have Arrow installed, there are some installation instructions.
Next, you’ll probably want to configure the server.

Tutorial

Once you have things up and running, you can start writing Ruby.

API Documentation

Arrow has full API documentation.

Cookbook

Once the tutorial is a bit more complete, we’ll start putting together some recipes for common tasks. For now, though, we suggest you take a look at the example applets in the applets/ directory of the distribution, and their corresponding templates in the templates/ directory.