I think it is safe to assume that aD is committed to its Tcl version
of ACS for quite a while. They just released a brand new version
(4.0!) which involved significant developer resources. The Java
version is also quite immature in comparison. I think that for the
next year and possibly the next 2 years, the Tcl version will be
alive and well. As for what will be in 2 years.... who can tell for any
company?
I also want to confirm what's been mentioned by the rest of the
team: ACS 4.0 is indeed a complete rewrite, and that is a good
thing. While I have been frustrated in the past with aD's
approach, they have significantly changed their ways: a public
CVS tree, meetings with OpenACS members to discuss design,
a better level of DB abstraction. aD's attitude today is not perfect
with respect to the open-source community, but it has improved
significantly, and they "get it" more and more every day.
As much as I can speak for the "community's intent," I'll say that
we want to port ACS 4.0, because it is a good system. Yes, it
makes use of Oracle-specific features like PL/SQL packages,
but did you really expect aD to ignore all Oracle-specific
features? Should we, members of the OpenACS team, not use
PostgreSQL's object-relational features because other RDBMS's
don't have them?
Why should you upgrade to 4.0? Because it's a significantly
better, well thought-out, extensible, and powerful web toolkit. But
don't take my word for it. Join the team, by all means, contribute,
and watch the system progress. I'm excited to see the result we'll
come up with.
