A few weeks back I helped write a small web application for some reporting
purposes using mod_ruby/eruby.  Being completely ignorant of CGI programming,
it was a fun learning experience, and thanks to those on this list that helped
me.

Being well received, now a more complicated application (with some
similarities) has been requested, and this time I'd like it to be less ad hoc.

What I'm looking for is a Ruby package to help with the bookkeeping due to the
stateless nature of CGI programming.

The previous project used hidden HTML fields to keep state as the client would
fill in various form pages.  The contents of the forms are dependent on
previous choices, hence the need to maintain state.

It really felt like a bad hack, but a colleague (who did most of the rhtml)
says that this is just how its done:  the parts of the program that interact
directly with the web are just generally ugly.

There are several ideas that come to mind to help.  Simply wrap some methods
around creating hidden fields to manage data, or use a session ID and the
Marshal module to write the state to disk.  Is there a framework that will help
with this (and likely other related tasks)?

However my real question is:  does something already exist that helps me with
this?  I've looked through the RAA, and the closest thing I saw was borges, but
my platform is Apache (not WEBrick).

Realize I'm not very well versed in the proper terminology etc. so I may be
missing some obvious things.  It may be that what I want is simple enough that
no one has made a package, if so I guess we'll just write it.  But I just have
this feeling that something this common has got to be part of a larger
framework.

Does anyone have any suggestions?  

Thanks in advance,

-- 
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Brett Williams                                 | 
Agilent Technologies                           | brett_williams / agilent.com
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