a. OpenACS Introduction

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  1. What is OpenACS?
  2. What license is OpenACS available under?
  3. Why would I want to use OpenACS?
  4. What do I need to run OpenACS?
  5. Who is responsible for OpenACS?
  6. Can you give me some more references to learn about OpenACS development?
  7. Does OpenACS support Unicode, multiple languages, and internationalization?

  1. Q: What is OpenACS?

    A: OpenACS is the Open Architecture Community System. It is a fully open-source toolkit for building online communities.

  2. Q: What license is OpenACS available under?

    A: It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

  3. Q: Why would I want to use OpenACS?

    A: OpenACS is a powerful web toolkit for building highly-scalable database-backed web sites. It is almost a web site in a box, but mostly it is a set of tools and utilities to make building a collaborative web site much easier and faster. The main advantage of OpenACS over its competitors is that it is highly scalable, well integrated, and has an excellent architecture for building programs that interoperate with others.

    A forum thread dealing with scalability of OpenACS compared to Zope.

    A forum thread comparing OpenACS to Zope.

  4. Q: What do I need to run OpenACS?

    A: OpenACS is composed of three parts: AOLserver, PostgreSQL or Oracle, and the OpenACS codebase.

    AOLserver is a powerful, multi-threaded web server distributed by AOL. most of AOL's high-load web sites, including all of AOL Digital City. It is available under the GNU General Public License or Mozilla Public License at aolserver.com.

    PostgreSQL is an enterprise-class RDBMS. It is available under an open-source license (BSD license). It is available for download at postgresql.org. Oracle and Postgres are equally supported by OpenACS.

    The OpenACS platform (AOLserver, PostgreSQL or Oracle, and the OpenACS codebase) runs on almost all variants of Unix (Solaris, HP/UX, BSD, Linux) and with some effort on Windows 2000. In the spirit of keeping the entire platform free and open-source, OpenACS is developed and tested on Linux.

    See here for the compatibility matrix of what works with what versions.

  5. Q: Who is responsible for OpenACS?

    A: OpenACS is developed by a world-wide community of experienced web hackers who are committed to OpenACS as a solid, fully open-source web platform. The entire team has never met all at once: in fact, out of the many contributors, only a handful have met in person at all.

    The technological direction of OpenACS is decided on by the OpenACS Core Team, which is elected by participating members of the community.

  6. Q: Can you give me some more references to learn about OpenACS development?

    A: If you've installed OpenACS, all the documentation is available for perusing from by visiting your /doc directory from your web browser. Similar documentation is available from OpenACS by visiting the official OpenACS documentation. These docs include a tutorial for getting started creating a package of your own.

    An introduction to the OpenACS community, and how to get started as a developer and user is available at Jade Rubick's getting started with OpenACS page.

    You can also look at the other FAQs, including the programmer's FAQ.

    There is some educational material available, including problem sets, and a link to browsing the CVS for OpenACS.

    There is a public service that uses htDig to index the OpenACS doc (the bboards at openacs.org, the bug reports, and the wimpypoints), and you can get search that index by visiting http://theashergroup.com/demos/openacs. The index is updated several times per week.

    Some more resources:

    1. a tcl reference book http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/,
    2. a sql reference book http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/,
    3. an AOLserver reference book http://aolserver.com/docs/devel/tcl/
    4. an OpenACS 4 book http://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/
    5. A wonderful overview of the ACS, it's development, and the philosophy behind it can be found in Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/. Keep in mind that he is talking about a version of OpenACS that is years old. It is a very good foundational book, however, and will give you an idea of how this all started.

  7. Q: Does OpenACS support Unicode, multiple languages, and internationalization?

    A: One of OpenACS's greatest strengths is internationalization. It is extremely easy to make your packages internationalized, and involve non-developers in the process of translation.

    Here is a posting on Unicode

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