Forum OpenACS Development: Re: The future of OpenACS

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3: Re: The future of OpenACS (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 08/06/07 10:56 PM
Tom,
As I said above, this isn't about bashing OACS so much as sharing my and others observations.

I really don't expect anything to change other than the number of people using OACS and AOLserver to continue to drop. It has always been a niche player so the reality is it doesn't really matter how many people are using it.

As much as I love TCL, the reality is that most products in the commercial world are developed in PHP. I don't want to learn PHP but I may be forced to.

As bad as PHP is, having to use MySQL is what I dread the most. The few sites I have that use it (qmailtoaster and squirrelmail) make me ill. Postgres is 1000% better than MySQL will ever be just due to the fact that it was designed correctly. Now if they could only make the object relational part work with foreign keys and etc.

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4: Re: The future of OpenACS (response to 3)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 08/06/07 11:45 PM
My point in response was that OACS has two main parts: core and add on packages. But besides the core 'code', there is a framework, or way of doing things which is valuable. There is a higher level framework for add on packages which I mostly disagree with but it is not necessary for me to use it. If someone were to develop a blogging package which handled all the configuration and customization details, they would not have to change any core features. Users would not need to know Tcl or even know that the system was written in Tcl. These are irrelevant details. I doubt very much that a change in the OACS core or changing to xoTcl would somehow help write the eventual killer app. And in any case, it could be done right now. But if your customers want PHP or MySQL, no amount of change here will help, and if they only care about how the app works, the language and platform should be unimportant.

If you really know Tcl and OACS, you must know that writing an app will be faster with these tools than with PHP, but maybe not fast for a marketable product. These things don't write themselves. Remodeling your kitchen doesn't improve your cooking skills.