Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Article on ACS x Zope

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Yes, I think you've expounded on this theme before and you've made it clear that folks considering an OO approach to web development irritate you.
I have nothing against the OO paradigm, I'm simply not one of the Faithful who believe it is the One True Paradigm. It's a great approach for decomposing certain types of problems. If the ACS had been designed in an OO manner, I'd certainly still be porting it over to Postgres.

My irritation has been with those who somewhat naively suggest that OO is the answer to the problems we face in trying to establish and more importantly maintain a true Open Source solution for building websites based on aD's ACS.

I'd hope you guys can work out with aD some sort of abstraction convention to which you can both write that lets you maintain parity with their code without needing to do a hairy seek-and-destroy on all the places within the app scripts that the standard differs between Oracle and Postgres every time they make a release. My impression based on Phillip Greenspun's disdain in The Guide for consistently imposing this sort of abstraction is that it seems a tough political task.
This, not the fact that the ACS wasn't developed using OO methodology, is the problem. Right. You've got it.

On a practical note, aD's moving to a centralized database API, which will pass all SQL through Tcl procs. They're doing it in order to rationalize the handling of database handles and to make it more difficult for their SQL weenies to break transaction semantics by calling nested procs that turn off transactions in the midst of a bunch of DML statements executed by the caller.

They're not doing it to help us with our porting problem. However, we'll be able to massage most of the more common Oracle-isms that have required manual porting in the past, so it helps us nonetheless.